Apply Strunk's timeless writing rules to ANY prose humans will read—documentation, commit messages, error messages, explanations, reports, or UI text. Makes your writing clearer, stronger, and more professional.
--- name: writing-clearly-and-concisely description: Apply Strunk's timeless writing rules to ANY prose humans will read—documentation, commit messages, error messages, explanations, reports, or UI text. Makes your writing clearer, stronger, and more professional. --- # Writing Clearly and Concisely ## Overview William Strunk Jr.'s *The Elements of Style* (1918) teaches you to write clearly and cut ruthlessly. **WARNING:** `elements-of-style.md` consumes ~12,000 tokens. Read it only when writing or editing prose. ## When to Use This Skill Use this skill whenever you write prose for humans: - Documentation, README files, technical explanations - Commit messages, pull request descriptions - Error messages, UI copy, help text, comments - Reports, summaries, or any explanation - Editing to improve clarity **If you're writing sentences for a human to read, use this skill.** ## Limited Context Strategy When context is tight: 1. Write your draft using judgment 2. Dispatch a subagent with your draft and `elements-of-style.md` 3. Have the subagent copyedit and return the revision ## All Rules ### Elementary Rules of Usage (Grammar/Punctuation) 1. Form possessive singular by adding 's 2. Use comma after each term in series except last 3. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas 4. Comma before conjunction introducing co-ordinate clause 5. Don't join independent clauses by comma 6. Don't break sentences in two 7. Participial phrase at beginning refers to grammatical subject ### Elementary Principles of Composition 8. One paragraph per topic 9. Begin paragraph with topic sentence 10. **Use active voice** 11. **Put statements in positive form** 12. **Use definite, specific, concrete language** 13. **Omit needless words** 14. Avoid succession of loose sentences 15. Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form 16. **Keep related words together** 17. Keep to one tense in summaries 18. **Place emphatic words at end of sentence** ### Section V: Words and Expressions Commonly Misused Alphabetical reference for usage questions ## Bottom Line Writing for humans? Read `elements-of-style.md` and apply the rules. Low on tokens? Dispatch a subagent to copyedit with the guide.
Creator's repository · obra/the-elements-of-style