P-CSO: Pinker’s Cognitive Style Optimization for Academic Writing
P-CSO (Pinker’s Cognitive Style Optimization) is a Claude Code skill set for academic writing, built around the sentence-level and paragraph-level principles from Chapters 4 and 5 of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style. It aims to reduce the cognitive burden a text places on its reader by improving syntax clarity and paragraph coherence.
The system ships five skills covering a full drafting workflow: p-cso-workflow runs the complete pipeline from notes to optimized draft, pinker-syntax and pinker-coherence apply the sentence- and paragraph-level rules individually, manuscript-writing-review audits terminology, numbers, and claim-to-evidence discipline after rewriting, and english-editing handles final grammar and article-usage polish. It installs either through the Claude Code plugin marketplace or by placing the skill files locally in a project.
Every skill returns a diagnostic report explaining what was changed and why, so the writer can learn to apply the same principles unassisted in future drafts, rather than treating the tool as a black box.
Status: Active — currently version 1.0.0, under regular development.