structure-improvement-advisor

Structure Improvement Advisor

What This Skill Does

Takes a draft with identified or suspected structural weaknesses and produces a concrete restructuring plan — including a recommended section order and the reasoning behind each change.

When To Use This Skill

• After running a structure flow check and you have a list of problems, but you are not sure how to fix them without unravelling the whole piece
• When a draft exists but feels fundamentally hard to follow, and you need a clear plan before you rewrite rather than redrafting blindly
• When you want to experiment with an alternative structure — inverted pyramid, narrative chronology, thematic blocks — without committing to a full rewrite first
• When an editor has returned a draft with "needs restructuring" notes and you need to translate vague feedback into specific moves

What You Need To Provide

Required: The full draft text.

Optional: A description of the structural problem as you understand it (e.g. "the story buries the news," "the argument doesn't land until too late," "it feels like two separate pieces joined in the middle"). If an editor has given you notes, paste them in. Also useful: the target format (print feature, bulletin script, online explainer) and intended audience.

How the Assistant Approaches This

1. Reads the draft and identifies its natural units — the distinct blocks of information, each of which does a single job (establishes context, introduces a person, presents evidence, makes an argument, provides a counterpoint, resolves the story).
2. Assesses what each block requires the reader to already know before it will make full sense, and what each block sets up for what follows. This creates a dependency map: which blocks must come first, which can float, which are doing double duty.
3. Proposes a restructured sequence that puts each block in the position where it lands with maximum clarity and impact. The proposal explains the logic behind each placement decision in plain terms — not "per narrative convention" but "because the reader needs to understand X before Y will make sense."
4. Flags any blocks that are duplicating content, carrying mixed purposes (and should be split), or missing entirely (a gap in the logic that a new passage would need to fill).