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Writing clearly and concisely

Skill xico42/codeherd/.agents/skills/writing-clearly-and-concisely

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.From its SKILL.md

Install
npx -y skills add xico42/codeherd --skill writing-clearly-and-concisely

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

  • 4 stars4 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

2.2 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

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

  1. One paragraph per topic
  2. Begin paragraph with topic sentence
  3. Use active voice
  4. Put statements in positive form
  5. Use definite, specific, concrete language
  6. Omit needless words
  7. Avoid succession of loose sentences
  8. Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form
  9. Keep related words together
  10. Keep to one tense in summaries
  11. 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.

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.