Curse Of Knowledge Detector

Diagnose a draft for the Curse of Knowledge — the expert blind spot that makes insiders write copy full of unexplained jargon, buried assumptions, strategy-level abstractions, and tacit shared context that lose non-expert audiences. Use this skill whenever reviewing a pitch, announcement, explainer, landing page, onboarding doc, slide, internal memo, or technical write-up for clarity to a non-expert. Activate when the user says things like "why isn't my message landing", "make this clearer", "my audience doesn't get it", "I can't tell if this is too technical", "diagnose this draft", "is this too jargony", "expert blind spot", "tapper listener", "translate for non-experts", "audit this for jargon", "I'm too close to this", or provides a draft plus an audience description and asks for a clarity critique. Also triggers when a user complains that smart readers stare blankly at their copy, when an explainer is full of acronyms, when an announcement leads with context instead of news, or when a strategy deck reads like a mission statement generator. This skill does NOT rewrite the draft end-to-end (that is the message-clinic skill) and does NOT score the full SUCCESs rubric (that is the stickiness-audit skill) — it produces a targeted report of Curse-of-Knowledge violations with locations, reasons, and rewrite guidance.

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Install

Claude CodeClawhHubnpxCursorCodexGemini CLI

1. Add marketplace

› /plugin marketplace add bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills

2. Install plugin

› /plugin install made-to-stick@bookforge-skills

3. Use the skill

› /curse-of-knowledge-detector

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Source Book

Made to Stick

Chip Heath, Dan Heath

More from Made to Stick

Communicationhybrid

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Pick the strongest credibility evidence for a claim and kill weak evidence chains with the Sinatra Test. Use this skill whenever the user asks 'how do I prove this?', 'how do I make this more credible?', 'which statistic should I cite?', 'do I need a source for this?', 'how do I build trust?', 'this claim sounds unbelievable', 'they won't believe us', 'we need a case study', 'should I quote an expert?', 'is this testimonial strong enough?', 'which proof point should I lead with?', 'my pitch needs more evidence', 'the numbers aren't landing', 'how do I back this up without a credentials wall?', 'who should say this for maximum credibility?', or 'is one example enough or do I need data?'. Also invoke when the user has a marketing claim, sales pitch, fundraising ask, research finding, policy argument, product benefit, or security/reliability promise and must choose between authority quotes, customer stories, statistics, vivid details, testable demos, or a single hero example. This skill ranks evidence across six named credibility categories (external authority, antiauthority, testable credentials, vivid details, Sinatra Test hero example, statistics-as-illustration) and applies the Sinatra Test as a pass/fail filter to cut weak chains. Run BEFORE shipping any claim that a skeptical audience might doubt.

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