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@6099c50
by Jesse Vincentobra/the-elements-of-style590 stars
78

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.

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Use this Skill: https://skilld.dev/gh/obra/the-elements-of-style/writing-clearly-and-concisely

This session only. Nothing lands on disk.

SKILL.md

≈61 tokens always: the name and description. ≈485 when used: this file. ≈18k more on demand in 1 file.

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.

Source: SKILL.md on GitHub

Third-party checks

1 warning16d5 checks · Risk SAFE
  • Gen Agent Trust Hub16d

    This skill provides Strunk's classic writing guidelines for improving prose clarity. It consists entirely of informational Markdown documentation and contains no executable code or network operations.

  • Socket16d

    No alerts

  • Snyk16d

    Risk: LOW · No issues

  • Runlayer7mo

    2/2 files flagged

  • ZeroLeaks5mo

    Score: 93/100 · 2 sections analyzed

Provenance

Signed by skilld at 6099c50. This ties the file your Agent reads to that commit on GitHub. It does not review the instructions.

Last checked against GitHub 2 months ago.

Steadyupdated last year

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