A Claude skill that helps you build, structure, and edit any kind of communication using Patrick Winston's framework from MIT's "How to Speak" lecture and his book Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform.
It works for:
- Spoken: talks, lectures, keynotes, job talks, oral exams, defenses, speeches, toasts, elevator pitches, lightning talks, panels
- Slides: any deck (PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides)
- Written: reports, memos, emails, blog posts, abstracts, executive summaries, press releases, recommendation letters, papers, proposals
Every written output runs through a humanizer audit before delivery, so the result reads like a human wrote it, not an LLM.
SKILL.md contains the full skill. Fourteen Winston tools:
- The Empowerment Promise (every opening)
- VSN-C structure (Vision, Steps, News, Contributions)
- The Contributions ending (never label a section "Conclusions")
- Winston's Star: Symbol, Slogan, Surprise, Salient, Story
- Four engagement heuristics: cycle, build a fence, verbal punctuation, ask a question
- Time and place rules for talks (11 AM, lights up, more than half full)
- Board vs slides vs props (with Winston's empathetic-mirroring theory)
- Slide hygiene (the real list of crimes Winston demonstrates)
- Six standard openings for written work
- The abstract checklist
- Style rules from Chapter 23
- The broken-glass outline
- Surface clues for skimmers
- Format-specific guidance per artifact type
Plus a routing table covering ~15 formats, three response modes (full draft, critique, structure), worked examples, and a mandatory humanizer pass.
git clone https://github.com/Anastasios3/winston-coach.git ~/.claude/skills/winston-coachThe skill activates automatically when you ask Claude Code to draft, structure, or edit any communication.
- Download or clone this repo
- Zip the
winston-coachfolder (folder must containSKILL.mdat the top level) - Go to https://claude.ai/settings/capabilities
- Click Upload skill and drop the zip
- Toggle it on
The skill is then available in all your Claude.ai conversations on web, the macOS/Windows desktop apps, and the mobile apps.
Write me a 5-minute pitch for my AI tutoring startup.
Audit these slides — they're for my dissertation defense.
How should I open my keynote at the conference next month?
Rewrite this report so the contributions section actually lands.
Help me structure a 20-page proposal for a Series A.
The skill detects the format, picks the right Winston tools, drafts, runs the humanizer audit, and delivers the final.
Most "presentation advice" online is recycled summary of a summary. Patrick Winston's work is the original source for the actual rules (Empowerment Promise, the Star, VSN-C, Contributions-not-Conclusions). His 60-minute MIT lecture and his 354-page book are both extraordinary and both underused. This skill packages them so you can apply them on any communication task, in any Claude conversation, without having to re-read either source every time.
The humanizer pass exists because the cleanest application of Winston's rules still reads as obviously AI-generated if you don't strip the LLM tells. Winston wanted readers to find their own voice. This skill keeps that promise.
Primary:
- Winston, Patrick H. "How to Speak." MIT OpenCourseWare RES.TLL-005, January IAP 2018. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/res-tll-005-how-to-speak-january-iap-2018/ (CC BY-NC-SA)
- Winston, Patrick H. Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform. MIT Press, 2020. ISBN 978-0-262-53938-8.
The humanizer pass draws from Wikipedia's "Signs of AI writing" guide, maintained by WikiProject AI Cleanup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Several popular summaries of Winston's work contain factual errors. This skill uses the corrected versions:
- The book's primary editorial contributor is Karen A. Prendergast (Winston's wife) and Sarah Winston (his daughter), with a foreword by Gill Pratt. The book is not by "Karen Prensky."
- The book was substantially complete before Winston's death in July 2019 and published August 2020, not 2024.
- "Salient idea" means sticks out, not important (Winston corrects this directly in the lecture).
- Font rule is 40 to 50pt, not just 40pt.
- The "10 slide crimes," "5 rules for stopping," and "Promise-Inspire-Salute" framings are popularizations; Winston himself does not enumerate them that way.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Free for personal and educational use. Attribution required. Derivatives must use the same license. Commercial use requires explicit written permission from the author of this repository.
If you want to use this skill (or a derivative) in a commercial product, paid service, training course, or any context where money changes hands, contact me first.
See LICENSE for the full text.
PRs welcome for:
- Bug fixes in the Winston attributions or framework details (with primary-source citation)
- Additional worked examples
- Translations
- Adapters for other AI tools
Please open an issue first for larger changes.
Built by Anastasios3, with Claude.
Patrick Winston (1943-2019) was Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT and ran the MIT AI Lab from 1972 to 1997. He taught his "How to Speak" lecture every January for forty years. The MIT obituary: https://news.mit.edu/2019/patrick-winston-professor-obituary-0719