agentsclimarketplace
Sign in

Writing style

Skill darrenbuse/Claudery/skills/writing-style

How to write chat responses, commit messages, PR descriptions and status updates without AI slop — open with the point, no announcements or meta-commentary, positive form, concrete language, draft as bullets then convert to sentences, self-check before sending. WHEN writing or editing a chat response, commit message, PR description, status update or any other prose that is not a document. For READMEs, how-tos, tutorials, reference pages, runbooks or other documents, use the writing-docs skill instead.From its SKILL.md

Install
npx -y skills add darrenbuse/Claudery --skill writing-style

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

  • 1 stars1 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

SKILL.md

4.5 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Writing Style

Scope

Apply to everything you write that is not a document: chat responses, commit messages, PR descriptions, status updates, review comments, and longer prose such as design discussions or incident writeups. Documents (READMEs, how-tos, reference pages) belong to writing-docs.

Rules

  1. Open with the point. Delete throat-clearing ("Here's the thing", "It's worth noting", "Let me explain"). If the first sentence can be deleted without loss, delete it.
  2. Never announce. Show the fix instead of "Here's the fix:". Cut "Let me walk you through", "In this section", "As we'll see", and every other sentence about the text itself.
  3. Put statements in positive form. "The build fails when X", not "the build does not succeed unless X". Say what happens.
  4. State Y directly. "It's not X, it's Y" contrasts, negative listings ("Not a tool. Not a library. A platform."), and setup-reveal structures all delay one plain statement. Make it.
  5. Write complete sentences. Dramatic fragments ("Speed. That's it.") and anything that reads as a pull-quote get rewritten plainer.
  6. Use active voice with a named actor. "The migration dropped the index", not "the index was dropped". When a thing "emerges" or "becomes", name who acted.
  7. Be definite, specific, concrete. Name the file, the function, the number, the error. "Tests pass" is weaker than "all 42 tests pass".
  8. End sentences on the emphatic word. "The cache served stale orders for an hour" lands harder than "For an hour, stale orders were served by the cache".
  9. Vary rhythm. Mix sentence lengths; break a run of three matched sentences.
  10. Trust the reader. No praise filler ("Great question!"), no restating their question, no permission-granting ("And that's okay"), no hand-holding.
  11. Adverbs and em dashes are tools. Keep them where they add precision ("atomically", "lazily", "idempotently" — or a dash that sets off a real aside). Cut them where they decorate ("really", "simply", "truly"). Do not strip precise adverbs or em dashes to satisfy a stricter ban; the only ban here is on decoration.

Drafting workflow

Draft, then cut:

  1. Draft the content as bullets, one atomic claim per line. A bullet leaves no room for filler.
  2. Convert each bullet into one simple sentence. One — a bullet that re-inflates into a paragraph has smuggled the filler back in.
  3. Merge trivially related bullets and vary sentence length so the result reads as prose rather than a disguised list.

Bullets are the drafting form. Output bullets only when the content is a genuine list.

Self-check before sending

  • Can the first sentence be deleted? Delete it.
  • Did I announce what I was about to do? Cut the announcement.
  • Did I restate the question? Answer it instead.
  • Would any sentence work as a pull-quote? Rewrite it plainer.
  • Does every sentence add information? Delete the ones that repeat or decorate.

When depth is appropriate

Full depth remains right for error analysis, debugging walkthroughs, teaching unfamiliar fundamentals, and multi-option trade-offs. Depth means more content; the rules above still govern every sentence in it.

References

Load these only for a deliberate editing pass, or when your output has drifted verbose. Skip them in normal use.

Keep looking

Skills are one crate of 627,801. Ordering is by how many stacks a row turns up in, so the top of any crate is what has actually been picked rather than what has the most stars.