Human writing

Human writing

Writing is clarity extended as a courtesy to one specific reader. Every directive below serves that reader; none of them serve the writer's wish to sound impressive.

The one test

Read it aloud. Fix everything you would not say to one specific person across a table. Your breath finds uniform rhythm, your mouth refuses "it is recommended that," and you hear yourself droning "furthermore." Per sentence: would I say it this way to a friend? If not, say it that way instead (Paul Graham's test, and Zinsser's before him).

Directives

Sentence mechanics (Strunk & White)

• Omit needless words. Every word earns its place or goes.
• Use the active voice. The subject acts; the sentence moves.
• Put statements in positive form. Say what is, not what is not.
• Prefer definite, specific, concrete language. A number, a name, a date, a sensory fact.
• End on the emphatic word. The last position in a sentence carries the most weight; spend it on the point.
• One topic per paragraph. A new topic gets a new paragraph.
• Use plain is/are. Not "serves as," not "boasts," not "features."

Why the mechanics work (Williams, Pinker)

• Characters as subjects, actions as verbs. "The committee decided" beats "a decision was reached by the committee." Readers parse who-did-what fastest when grammar mirrors it.
• Old information before new. Start sentences with what the reader already knows; land on what is new. Flow between sentences comes from this, not from connective words.
• Write in classic style. Writer and reader are equals looking at the same thing; the prose is a window, not a performance (Pinker).
• Fight the curse of knowledge. The root cause of unclear prose is forgetting what it was like not to know. State what the reader must already know; define terms on first use; test on a cold reader.

The writer's posture (Zinsser, Graham, McPhee)

• Simplify. Strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Zinsser: "clutter is the disease of American writing."
• Write for one person. Not a committee, not a market segment.
• Take a position and say it first. The section's first sentence says what the section believes. Confidence varies with evidence, not uniformly.
• Keep one voice. One writer's word choices, one joke, one irritation, held across the whole piece. Unity of tense, mood, and pronoun.
• Ground every abstraction. A thousand details add up to one impression (McPhee). "Comprehensive integration" says nothing; "it connects to Slack, Salesforce, and HubSpot; setup takes 15 minutes" says everything.
• Volunteer one failure. "After 200 implementations, three patterns held; the first two attempts did not." Experience is specifics plus what went wrong.
• Trust the reader. Adjacent facts need no "furthermore"; juxtaposition does the work, and the reader who infers the connection feels smart.
• Rewriting is the writing. The first draft finds the idea; the next drafts find the reader.

Voice calibration

When the author's real writing is available (past posts, emails, docs), match it: sentence rhythm, characteristic word choices, punctuation habits, recurring tics. Calibrate to the author, never to a house default. Without a sample, aim for the plainest register the content allows.

Working on an existing draft

Two workflows. Rewriting from the essence is the default; editing in place is the switch.

Editing preserves the draft's skeleton, and the skeleton is what gives a machine draft away. The edit workflow below opens by saying exactly that, then prescribes pruning — which leaves the shape intact. A tells catalogue is a detector besides: aimed at existing sentences it produces avoidance, which is how a draft ends up beige rather than human. The directives above compose only when they are writing, not when they are arbitrating someone else's sentence.

Choosing the mode

Edit in place when any of these hold:

• The request says revise, tighten, edit only, or light pass.
• The request signals preserve-my-sentences in any wording: "keep my phrasing," "don't rewrite it," "just clean it up a little." Intent governs; the words above are examples, not a magic list.
• The text is fidelity-critical regardless of phrasing: quoted material, legal, medical, or compliance wording, technical specifications, or anything that will be cited or diffed.

Otherwise rewrite from the essence — including the mixed case, where someone drafted with a model and then worked the text over by hand. Mixed drafts still carry the generated skeleton, so they get the rewrite; what protects the author's contribution is the voice distillation in step 3, which reads that draft as the voice sample.

When the mode is genuinely ambiguous and the draft may be the author's own, ask. One question costs less than a voice overwritten.

Rewrite from the essence (default)

1. Distill the essence. List every claim, number, name, date, quotation, and the spine of the argument. This list is the contract: nothing ships that is not on it, and nothing on it gets dropped. Write it down and keep it — step 5 checks the draft against it, and a list you are holding in your head is not something you can check anything against.
2. Check the list against the source before writing a sentence. Hedges, caveats, and attributions are load-bearing more often than they look — a qualifier someone added deliberately reads as removable right up until it is gone. Then fill the gaps: ask the author for the specifics the draft only gestures at, and cut every claim nobody can substantiate. A rewrite invents nothing, so an abstraction with no fact behind it has to leave rather than be restated in plainer words. If that empties the list, stop and say so — the draft had no content, and what the author needs is the question, not a shorter arrangement of nothing.
3. Distill the voice. The author's other writing, when available, is the calibration target. Without a sample, if the draft is the author's own prose, the draft is the sample — take its rhythm, characteristic word choices, punctuation habits, recurring tics. If the draft is machine-written there is no voice to carry; use the plainest register the content allows.
4. Write fresh from the Directives. Work from the essence list and the voice notes, not from the original's sentences. Rereading them mid-draft re-anchors you to the structure you are replacing, which is the failure this whole mode exists to avoid. While composing, vary sentence length and follow a long, clause-laden build with a short landing — rhythm is cheaper to build in than to retrofit. First person where true, one anecdote, one thing that went wrong.
5. Reconcile against the written list, item by item. Walk the list and find each item in the finished draft. Memory is what lets items go missing — a draft reads complete whether or not it is. Then the reverse: nothing in the draft that is off the list, and quoted material verbatim. Strike anything you cut on purpose, with its reason, so the cut is a decision rather than an omission. Writing the reason down often exposes a usable instruction inside a claim you were cutting for being vague.
6. Read aloud (the one test, above).
7. De-slop sweep as a check. Load references/ai-tells.md and sweep. Here the sweep confirms; it does not construct, and its benchmark does not apply — see that file's Benchmark note. Run its literal-question test on every phrase that sounds finished. A grep matches words rather than shapes, and a fresh draft invents its own flourishes rather than inheriting the original's.
8. Voice pass (last). Does the whole read as one specific person — and, when the source supplied the voice sample, as that person? A rewrite that passes every other check and sounds like nobody has failed.

Edit in place (the switch)

1. Skeleton first. Remove preview paragraphs, recap endings, symmetrical heading grids. Structure gives a draft away before any sentence does.
2. Read aloud (the one test, above). Mark everything that is not talk — the pass's output is the quoted list of marked sentences; no list means the pass did not run. When you wrote the draft yourself, wait long enough to read the words instead of your intent, or hand the read to a cold reader: a ten-second-old sentence gets confirmed, not read.
3. Specificity pass. Replace abstractions with numbers, names, dates — taken from the author or the source material, never invented. Ask the author for the missing specifics; cut what nobody can substantiate.
4. De-slop pass. Load references/ai-tells.md and sweep the draft against it; its benchmark says how much a real pass touches. Run its deletion test on every sentence that closes a paragraph or section — closers are where filler hides, in every register — and its literal-question test on every phrase that sounds finished. Worked demonstration: references/examples.md.
5. Experience pass. First person where true, one anecdote, one thing that went wrong.
6. Rhythm pass. Vary sentence length; follow a long, clause-laden build with a short landing. Let commas and periods do the work; keep only the dash doing work they cannot.
7. Voice pass (last). Does the whole read as one specific person?

When siblings load

Which signals apply under each sibling skill is defined once, in references/ai-tells.md ("Scope by skill") — read it there rather than from any skill's own text. writing-markdown governs formatting and stacks cleanly with this skill.

Caution

These directives are probabilistic, not laws. Technical senses of flagged words stay ("navigate" for literal navigation). And Orwell's sixth rule closes every list of rules, including this one: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."