Guest Post Editor

What it does

Reads a submitted guest draft alongside the site's established style (heading conventions, link and image formatting, author bio placement, tone) and rewrites the draft's structure and mechanics to match, without altering the contributor's argument, examples, or voice. It produces a list of substantive edits separately from mechanical ones so the guest author can review what actually changed in meaning.

Install

This skill isn't packaged in an installable registry. It's a plain SKILL.md file you can copy directly. Copy it from the SKILL.md tab and save it at the path for your assistant:

Use it in your AI assistant

Claude Code

.claude/skills/guest-post-editor/ (or ~/.claude/skills/guest-post-editor/ for all projects)

GitHub Copilot (VS Code)

.github/skills/guest-post-editor/

OpenAI Codex

.codex/skills/guest-post-editor/

Cursor

.cursor/skills/guest-post-editor/ (or ~/.cursor/skills/guest-post-editor/ globally)

Compatibility

Any WordPress site that accepts guest contributions. No special plugin required; benefits from an existing style guide or a handful of past posts to learn conventions from.

The complete SKILL.md for this skill:

---
name: guest-post-editor
description: Use when a user needs a guest contributor's draft edited to match house style before publishing. Triggers on "clean up this guest post", "make this match our style", or "edit this contributor draft".
---

# Guest Post Editor

## When to use
A guest post has been submitted and needs its formatting, heading structure, and mechanics brought in line with the site's house style before it goes live, while keeping the contributor's actual content intact.

## Procedure
1. Pull 2 to 3 recent published posts (or a style guide, if one exists) to establish the site's conventions: heading capitalization, link formatting, image caption style, and typical intro length.
2. Read the guest draft and identify mechanical mismatches (heading case, missing alt text, inconsistent subheading depth, informal contractions if the site is formal, or vice versa).
3. Fix the mechanical and formatting issues directly, leaving the contributor's arguments, examples, and personal voice untouched.
4. Separately flag any substantive issues (an unsupported claim, a missing citation, a section that reads as an ad for the contributor's own product) as suggestions, not edits, since only the contributor or editor should resolve those.
5. Add or normalize the author bio block to match the site's standard bio format and placement.

## Guardrails
- Do not rewrite the contributor's voice, opinions, or examples to sound like the house writing staff; house style covers formatting and mechanics, not the argument itself.
- Do not silently remove a claim or link that looks self-promotional; flag it for the editor to decide, since that's an editorial judgment call, not a formatting one.