Report Structure Formatter

Drafts arrive written in the order the author figured things out; readers need them in the order decisions get made. This skill rebuilds a messy draft into the standard decision shape — a standalone summary up front, findings ranked by consequence, recommendations that trace back to evidence — without losing a single number or claim from the original along the way.

When to use this skill

• A draft reads like a diary of the analysis rather than a document built for its reader
• An executive summary needs writing, or the existing one cannot stand alone
• Findings, background, and recommendations are interleaved and need untangling
• Multiple contributors produced sections that disagree in structure, tense, and terminology
• A long document must shrink to a page limit without losing substance

Instructions

1. Inventory before surgery. List every distinct claim, finding, figure, and recommendation in the draft and give each a short ID. This list is your conservation law: by the end, every item is placed in the body, moved to an appendix, or explicitly retired with a reason.
2. Fix the target shape: executive summary, background (short), approach (only if the work is analytical), findings, recommendations, appendices. Depart from it only for a house template.
3. Write the executive summary last and place it first. Four moves: the situation in one sentence, the three to five findings that matter, the recommendation, and the decision requested of the reader. Nothing may debut in the summary that the body does not develop.
4. Order findings by consequence to the reader — never by order of discovery, and never by effort expended. The chronology of the work is the least interesting thing about it.
5. One finding per heading, and headings in parallel grammar: all assertions ("Renewal pricing drives most churn"), not a mix of labels, questions, and sentence fragments.
6. Push detail down relentlessly. Method notes, full tables, instrument wording, edge cases — all of it moves to appendices, each referenced from the body so it stays findable.
7. Chain recommendations to findings by ID. A recommendation citing no finding is an opinion, and a finding feeding no recommendation must justify the rank you gave it.
8. Reconcile the numbers: the same figure appears identically everywhere it appears — summary, body, table, appendix. Rounding differences count as disagreements.
9. Close with a formatting pass: numbered headings, every table and figure titled and referenced in the text, data sources noted where numbers come from.

Output format

# <Title> — <date, version, author>

## Executive summary        (half a page, fully standalone)
## Background               (why this document exists; one page maximum)
## Approach                 (only if analytical: what was examined, and how)
## Findings
### F1. <assertion>         (evidence, exhibit, confidence)
### F2. <assertion>
## Recommendations
### R1. <action> — addresses F1, F3 · owner · timing
## Appendices
### A. <full data tables>   (referenced from F1)

Quality bar

• The executive summary survives being detached from the document entirely.
• The inventory reconciles to zero lost items — nothing silently dropped in the rebuild.
• A skim of the headings alone recovers the argument.
• Every number in the summary matches its twin in the body to the digit.
• Background contains only background — anything that argues, asserts, or recommends has been moved to the section where it can be held to account.