Anti-Defensive Writing

Anti-Defensive Writing is Kiterlin's Agent Skill for making academic and technical prose clearer and more confident. It finds the defensive habits that weaken writing, pre-emptive apologies, repeated disclaimers, stacked hedges, self-deprecation and over-explanation, and removes them, while keeping the scope, accuracy, safety, legal, ethical and methodological limits that genuinely belong. What it does - Advances the claim directly instead of burying it under caveats - Replaces defensive disclaimers with a positive definition of scope - Calibrates uncertainty to the evidence, rather than hedging by reflex - Keeps the necessary limits: methodology, safety, legal and ethical boundaries stay - Works on drafts and revisions: papers, abstracts, introductions, discussions, grant writing, product and policy writing, and professional reports How it installs - Install the skill with npx skills add kiterlin/anti-defensive-writing. It works with Claude Code, Codex and other agents that support skills. - Point it at a draft and ask for a clearer, stronger, less caveated version. Good to know - It documents both English and Chinese prose. - Open source under the MIT license.