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German technical writing

Skill netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill/skills/german-technical-writing

Agent Skill for natural German technical register in Jira tickets, internal German docs, and team chat to German-speaking colleagues — catches English→German anglicisms, enforces canonical technical lexicon | Claude Code compatible

Install
npx -y skills add netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill --skill german-technical-writing

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What its author says it does

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Use when writing German-language prose longer than one sentence for Jira tickets, internal German wiki/spec docs, or team-chat to German-speaking colleagues (Slack, Matrix, Teams). Invoke BEFORE composing. Covers anglicism verbs (failt, triggern, returnen), calqued collocations and idioms (blockiert auf, macht Sinn, in 2026), loanword genders (der Commit, die Pipeline), per-artifact register (impersonal for Jira/wiki, ich/du for chat), German typography (Gedankenstrich, Anführungszeichen, Durchkopplung), and AI-typical rhythm (restatement, symmetric paragraphs, summary closers). Skip for commit messages, MR/PR descriptions, release notes (English by team convention), conversational chat replies, or single-line acknowledgments. If you catch yourself thinking 'my German is probably fine here' for anything longer than a sentence — invoke this skill.

The file declares its own license as (MIT AND CC-BY-SA-4.0). See LICENSE-MIT and LICENSE-CC-BY-SA-4.0. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.

SKILL.md

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German Technical Writing

Natural German technical register for German-audience artifacts — not English-first composition phrase-translated into DeepL-German.

Process

  1. Compose in German directly, not by translating. Restart if you catch yourself drafting English first.
  2. Self-review each sentence against references/anti-patterns.md — verbs, collocations, idioms, Amtsdeutsch.
  3. Apply the lexicon — canonical verbs and loanword gender: references/lexicon.md.
  4. Match register per artifact — impersonal for Jira/wiki, ich/du for chat: references/register.md.
  5. Typography & rhythm — Gedankenstrich, Durchkopplung; every fact once, varied sentence shapes: references/typografie-rhythmus.md.
  6. No editorializing — say what changed, not how good the work is: references/no-editorializing.md.
  7. If unsure, ask — don't guess.

Top anti-patterns

❌✅
code brichtschlägt fehl / wirft Exception
gefangenerkannt / abgefangen
null returnennull zurückgeben
Test failtschlägt fehl
Fehler triggernFehler auslösen
auf Fehler hittenauf Fehler stoßen
blockiert auf Xwartet auf X / hängt an X

Full catalogue in references/anti-patterns.md; worked examples in references/examples.md.

Three traps — apply all three disciplines

Over-applying one drives you into another:

  1. Anglicism (verb-level): English where German is canonical. Test failt → schlägt fehl. Targeted by the table above and anti-patterns.md.
  2. Calque (nouns, collocations, idioms): word-by-word translation where the loanword or another German structure is canonical. Wurzelursache → Root Cause; blockiert auf X → wartet auf X; macht Sinn → ist sinnvoll. See anti-patterns.md and lexicon.md.
  3. Amtsdeutsch over-polish: fleeing both traps into stiff officialese and AI-symmetric structure — Datenbestand, Es handelt sich um, passive chains, facts restated per section. See anti-patterns.md and typografie-rhythmus.md. Idiomatic dev speech (ins Gehege kommen, läuft voll, fliegt auf) is wanted, not a violation.

Noun rule: if a native German developer would say the term verbatim in a review or stand-up, keep it English — a German form that sounds like a textbook title is a calque.

Scope note

Commit messages, MR/PR descriptions, release notes and internal IT-project tickets (NRS, NRT, SRV*, IO*, LIC) are English — skip them. This skill governs how to write German, not whether.

Keep looking

Skills are one crate of 328,083. 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.