Technical Writing
A third-party skill from the pstack plugin in Cursor's cursor/plugins repo, authored by Lauren Tan. It edits prose in four passes — which Diataxis mode a document is in, whether sentences address the reader directly, how much each sentence tries to carry, and whether any sentence can be read two ways — and sits three rules above those passes: cut words that do no work, prefer the short everyday word over the fancy one, and never follow a rule so far that the sentence gets worse. It runs on the explicit /technical-writing command only, not on natural-language requests. It also expects the sibling unslop skill from the same plugin; without it, some of its checks won't run. We did not write it and have not reviewed it.
This skill hasn't been reviewed yet.
What it does
Layered editing standard for docs, RFCs, READMEs, PR descriptions, and commit messages — cut filler, use plain words, rewrite double readings so they can't happen
How to use this
Once it is installed, this skill picks itself up. You do not need to name it.
- Created by
- Lauren Tan
- Category
- Content
- Source
- View source
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Technical Writing
A third-party skill from the pstack plugin in Cursor's cursor/plugins repo, authored by Lauren Tan. It edits prose in four passes — which Diataxis mode a document is in, whether sentences address the reader directly, how much each sentence tries to carry, and whether any sentence can be read two ways — and sits three rules above those passes: cut words that do no work, prefer the short everyday word over the fancy one, and never follow a rule so far that the sentence gets worse. It runs on the explicit /technical-writing command only, not on natural-language requests. It also expects the sibling unslop skill from the same plugin; without it, some of its checks won't run. We did not write it and have not reviewed it.
Third-party, by Lauren Tan
September 15, 2026
Install technical-writing
This skill lives in the pstack plugin inside cursor/plugins, not this marketplace, so you install it with the skills CLI instead of the usual plugin-marketplace flow. The command below pulls whatever is on cursor/plugins' main branch right now, not the exact commit this page describes — install the sibling unslop skill too if you want the full behavior.
- 1
Add the skill from its source repo
Pulls the technical-writing skill out of the pstack plugin and installs it locally. Add unslop as a second --skill if you also want its companion checks.
npx skills add https://github.com/cursor/plugins --skill technical-writing
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What this skill does
This is an overview of the skill from the site, not the skill's real instructions. The full SKILL.md Claude reads when this skill is active lives on GitHub at the source below.
Lauren Tan authored this skill as part of the pstack plugin in Cursor’s
cursor/plugins repo, surfaced on skills.sh at
skills.sh/cursor/plugins/technical-writing.
We list it here because it’s a real, working editing standard people search
for — we did not write it and have not reviewed it. It only runs on the
explicit /technical-writing command; it does not respond to natural-language
requests like “tighten this README.”
The skill checks a document against four layers, one question per layer: what kind of document this is (it borrows the Diataxis tutorial / how-to / reference / explanation split), whether sentences speak to the reader directly instead of around them, how much a single sentence is trying to carry before it should split, and whether any sentence can be misread because a modifier or pronoun sits in the wrong place. Above those four layers sit three standing rules: delete any word the sentence survives without, reach for the short everyday word over the longer one that only sounds more precise, and if a rule ever makes a sentence worse, fix the sentence another way rather than obey the rule.
Those standing rules are what make the skill’s edits predictable. Run it on a sentence like “In order to utilize the endpoint, it is important to note that responses are paginated” and it does exactly what its own rule set says: “in order to” collapses to “to” because the sentence loses nothing without the extra words, “utilize” is swapped for “use” because that is the plain word for the same action, and “it is important to note that” is dropped outright since it carries no information the reader needs. The result reads as “To use the endpoint, note that responses are paginated” or tighter still. The skill also carries a worked before/after example of its own, plus an eight-item review checklist, that follow the same pattern.
The pstack plugin’s own manifest and license file declare MIT. The
cursor/plugins repository itself carries no repo-root license file, so that
grant covers the plugin, not the repository as a whole.