The AI Pyramid Principle Writer skill for Claude

The AI Pyramid Principle Writer is a free skill from the TheSEO skill library. A skill is an instruction file, SKILL.md, that gives an AI assistant a fixed way of working for one task. Not software you install, not a subscription, not a template: one text file of 883 words that tells Claude how to rebuild any text into Barbara Minto's structure, in which order the six steps run, and which output format always comes out. You download the zip at the top of this page, put it in your Claude environment, and from that moment Claude structures your texts along this logic. If you are not yet sure what a skill is, start with what Claude skills are.

You recognise the problem the skill solves by one symptom: your text is long, but the core is unclear. The email to the investor starts with the founding of your company. The memo to the board builds three pages of tension towards a conclusion nobody reads any more. The annual plan lists twelve points, three of which say the same thing. The reader has to wade through every side issue before understanding what it is about, and most readers never get that far. This one turns the order around: the answer first, then the arguments, and only then the evidence.

By its own description the skill is meant for anyone who hears: write this more clearly, my message is not landing, my email is a mess, make this pitch ready. It names its strongest uses itself: an email to an investor about a pivot, an internal memo about a reorganisation, the executive summary of a slide deck, a pitch for a new client, an annual plan for the board, or a blog article that has to persuade. It belongs to the library of 100 free skills we make available from our AI and automation service, with no account and no sales email afterwards. All of them sit on the hub skills.

One thing to know in advance: the skill structures, it does not invent. The arguments come from your own material and the evidence has to come from you. If data is missing under an argument, no elegant sentence appears in its place but an open point with a question for you. That is not a limitation, it is the reason the final text survives a critical reader.

Barbara Minto developed the Pyramid Principle in the 1960s at McKinsey, where as one of the first female consultants she had to edit her colleagues' reports. Her observation was simple and has since become the standard for consultants, executives and managers: most people write in the order in which they thought, not in the order in which a reader decides. They start with the background, work through the analysis and end with the conclusion. The reader wants exactly the opposite.

The core arrives too late. A busy reader gives a document thirty seconds to make clear what it is about. If the answer sits on page three, the reader has already stopped on page one or, worse, started guessing at a conclusion. Which is why the governing thought has to be the very first sentence of the final text, before the opening.

The core sentence is not an answer. Many texts do have something like a core, but it is a description: we have analysed the market. That is not a message, that is an activity. So the governing thought has to be an opinion or a recommendation, fit in one sentence, is concrete and measurable, and answers the question from the opening. Marketing plays an important role is rejected in the file itself as a weak example.

The arguments overlap or are missing. Twelve loose points are not a line of reasoning. So it enforces 3 to 5 arguments that are MECE: they exclude each other and together cover the whole, on the same logical level. Apples next to apples, no half argument that really belongs under another one.

The evidence is thin air. Studies show, everybody knows, it is common knowledge: the skill rejects that kind of support. Under every argument belongs a concrete figure, example or source, and where that is missing an open point appears instead of a guess.

In diff form, with the examples from the file: what goes out and what comes back in its place.

A skill is only as good as its instructions, so we simply describe them here. The file opens with a description of when Claude should pick the skill up: on explicit terms such as pyramid principle, Minto method, MECE thinking or McKinsey structure, but also on everyday complaints such as write this more clearly, my email is a mess, pull out the main message, or when a text is long but the core is unclear. Say something like that to Claude while the skill is loaded and you get it automatically.

Then come the six steps. Step one is the SCQA framing: the skill asks for the situation everyone takes as given, the complication that changed it, the question that follows from it and your short answer to that question. Step two turns that answer into the governing thought and tests it against four demands: an opinion or recommendation, in one sentence, concrete and measurable, and a real answer to the question. Step three has Claude propose 3 to 5 arguments and tests them for MECE: no overlap, covering the whole, on the same logical level.

Step four chooses the form of reasoning: deductive, with premises leading to a conclusion, or inductive, with parallel points carrying the same message, where the file notes that induction is usually faster and stronger for executive communication. Step five demands evidence per argument and rejects vague support. And step six builds the final text along a fixed shape of seven parts: the governing thought as the first sentence, the SCQA opening in at most three sentences, a signpost, three arguments with two sentences of evidence each, and a closing sentence that repeats the core message.

The output format is fixed as well, and for daily use that is perhaps the most useful part. You always get three blocks: the pyramid as a diagram with the arguments and the evidence below them, the full text in executive summary form of at most 250 words, and the SCQA opening of three sentences as a separate block. You paste the diagram into a slide, the text into an email, the opening above a report. Want to build such an instruction file yourself? The structure is explained step by step in writing a SKILL.md.

It closes with a source list of three titles: Minto's own book, the structured communication guidelines from the McKinsey Quarterly archive, and Power Cues by Nick Morgan. More on those below.

The SKILL.md names three sources by name, and that is deliberate: it lets you read them and decide for yourself whether you agree with the method.

The method comes from Barbara Minto. The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking was published in 1987 by Pearson Education and is the canonical write up of what she developed at McKinsey in the 1960s. Everything the skill enforces is in there: the answer first, the SCQA opening, the pyramid of arguments, and the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. The book is not light reading, and that is exactly why a skill that carries out the method is more practical than learning the method by heart.

The working rules come from the McKinsey Quarterly archive. The structured communication guidelines published there over the years translate Minto into daily work: how short an opening may be, how to use a signpost, why an executive summary starts with the recommendation. The fixed shape of seven parts in step six leans on that tradition.

The receiving end comes from Nick Morgan. Power Cues was published in 2014 by Harvard Business Review Press and is about how messages come across: what a listener or reader picks up in the first seconds and why the order of information weighs so heavily. It underpins the thirty second demand the skill puts on the final text.

Even without installing the skill you can improve your own text with these principles: write down your conclusion in one sentence first, cross out every argument the case does not need, and put a figure you can show under every argument that remains.

If the trouble is not the order of your argument but whether you understand the subject well enough to explain it plainly, the AI Feynman Technique Coach is the skill that finds that out. And once the structure is right, if the message itself still has to stick, the measure for that is in the Made to Stick Coach skill, and if you want to train breaking problems apart as a separate craft, start with the MECE Issue Structure Coach skill.

The zip contains one folder with the SKILL.md in it. Installing is a matter of putting the file in the right place, and that place differs per environment. SKILL.md has been an open standard since December 2025, so the same skill also works in Codex, Cursor and Gemini CLI. You are not downloading a Claude file but a working instruction any modern AI assistant can read.

After that, using it is simple: paste your messy text, email or notes and say what it has to become, for example a memo for the board or an executive summary. It asks the SCQA questions it needs to sharpen the answer and then builds the pyramid. If you get stuck installing it, the full route per environment is in installing Claude skills. The wider explanation of working with AI is in the knowledge base.

At its strongest it is on texts that ask for a decision: the email to the investor, the memo about a sensitive change, the annual plan, the pitch, the executive summary above a long report. Anywhere a busy reader has to understand in thirty seconds what you want from them, the pyramid pays for itself immediately. It works well as a thinking tool too: anyone who cannot get their own plan into one governing thought with three load bearing arguments knows straight away where the plan itself is still shaky. That is often the biggest gain: the structure exposes what is missing in the substance.

There are also situations where you are better off leaving it alone. Texts that depend on tension and build up, a story, a case study working towards a reveal, a speech with a climax, lose their force if the answer sits in the first sentence. For descriptive documentation without a message, a manual or a report, a pyramid adds little: there is nothing to argue there. And the method orders arguments, it does not make them true: a governing thought that is wrong on the substance is only punctured faster by a tight structure, because the reader now sees it straight away.

The most honest limit sits in the evidence. Figures are demanded and gaps are marked, but nothing here can check whether your figures are right. The open points it hands back are homework, not a formality: a pyramid on unchecked evidence is a risk with a nice structure around it.

A pyramid makes sure your message lands with whoever reads it. In an email you pick that audience yourself; on your website the search engine has a say in who comes in. Use this structure on pages that are barely visited and you write the sharpest core message for nobody. The free SEO scan shows in seconds which pages are in the running and which stay silent. In the guide writing models compared you can see how this model relates to the others.