write-clear-prose

name

write-clear-prose

description

Drafts, revises, critiques, and coaches nonfiction prose for clarity, simplicity, structure, rhythm, voice, and audience — Zinsser-school craft. Use for essays, articles, business or technical writing, emails, speeches, opinion pieces, or developmental/line/copy editing. Triggers: clear writing, simplify prose, edit my essay, line edit, copyedit, clutter, rewrite, write it like a named creator, match this voice.

Write Clear Prose

Sources/gaps: references/sources.md maps the prose craft corpus; references/coverage-gaps.md keeps voice-matching, fact-checking, and genre-template candidates visible without overfitting the skill body.

Core Stance

Treat writing as thinking made visible: help the writer discover what they mean, then make the prose easy to follow, alive in the ear, and respectful of the reader's time. Draw on enduring craft principles associated with William Zinsser, George Orwell, Strunk and White, Joseph Williams, Steven Pinker, John McPhee, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roy Peter Clark, and similar teachers: clarity before ornament, concrete nouns and strong verbs, unity of purpose, humane voice, truthful specificity, and revision as the real work.

Add Heath & Heath's Made to Stick as a message-shaping lens when the prose must be remembered or acted on: find the core, make it concrete, create useful curiosity, make evidence credible at human scale, and carry the moral in a story.

Add Julie Zhuo's Looking Glass writing lens for workplace writing: distinguish whether the draft is meant to think, feel, or connect, then judge quality by that job. Writing to connect requires reader empathy before sentence polish.

Add Anton Sten's designer-writing lens when prose is being used to shape a product, pitch, or concept: writing can expose what is known, what is assumed, what the user should feel, and whether the idea has a coherent story before the artifact gets polished. Judge early writing by the clarity it creates, not by publishable style.

For AI-assisted drafts, treat "don't sound like AI" as a missing writing system, not as a token-ban problem. Do not fix generic prose by chasing one-off banned words or punctuation marks. Run the craft system instead: cut prefabricated phrases, prefer plain words, name the actor when it matters, replace jargon with everyday language, and keep any exception that makes the sentence more truthful, idiomatic, or alive.

Do not imitate any author at a fingerprint level. Use the principles, not the protected expression. Avoid long quotations from books unless the user explicitly asks and the excerpt is brief.

First Move

Before editing, identify:

• Reader: Who needs this and what do they already know?
• Job: What should the piece make the reader understand, feel, decide, or do?
• Form: Memo, essay, op-ed, profile, landing copy, email, speech, technical note, memoir, or other.
• State: Drafting from scratch, developmental edit, line edit, copyedit, title/lead/ending work, or coaching.
• Tolerance: Preserve the user's voice unless they ask for a stronger transformation.
• Reference voice: If the user names a target author, creator, channel, or sample to write "like," capture that voice from real material before drafting (see Matching a reference voice).

For memos, updates, and proposals, add Zhuo's reader-empathy pass:

• Which reader group is this for, and what is the cost of their attention?
• What is the lowest shared context in that group?
• What exact reader outcome do you want: decision, behavior change, reassurance, awareness, or feedback?
• What is the minimum context needed to get that outcome?
• Would a chart, screenshot, video, numbered list, DECISION: block, or ACTION: block carry the point better than paragraphs?

For design/product concept writing, add Sten's pre-visual pass:

• What do we know?
• What are we assuming?
• What user scenario makes the problem concrete?
• What feeling should the experience create at the key moments?
• Which story frame fits: familiar-pattern, before/after, or question/answer?

If the piece is missing, ask for it. If the task is clear enough, proceed without extra questions.

Depth Modes

Choose the lightest mode that satisfies the request:

• Quick tune: Fix clarity, flow, and obvious clutter while preserving structure.
• Line edit: Rewrite sentences for force, rhythm, precision, and voice.
• Deep edit: Diagnose intent, audience, structure, evidence, order, lead, ending, and line quality.
• Draft from notes: Shape raw material into a coherent piece before polishing sentences.
• Writing coach: Explain the craft move, then give a small exercise or next revision target.
• Editorial review: Give candid notes without rewriting the whole piece.

When the user asks for an "incredible," "pro," "deep," or "Zinsser-style" pass, default to Deep edit and load the reference files below.

Revision Workflow

Use only the passes the task needs. For substantial prose, move in this order:

1. Intent pass: State the thesis or promise in one plain sentence. If the draft does not serve it, name the mismatch.
2. Reader pass: Remove assumed context gaps. Add signposts only where they help the reader move.
3. Structure pass: Put the strongest material where attention is highest: opening, transitions, ending. Make each paragraph earn its place.
4. Clarity pass: Replace foggy abstraction with concrete detail. Prefer short familiar words when they carry the meaning.
5. Clutter pass: Cut throat-clearing, inflated phrasing, redundant modifiers, weak qualifiers, needless hedges, bureaucratic nouns, and passive evasions.
6. Voice pass: Restore human presence. Keep warmth, confidence, and individuality without forcing cleverness.
7. Sound pass: Read for rhythm, sentence length, emphasis, and awkward pileups. Vary cadence deliberately.
8. Truth pass: Check factual claims, attribution, names, numbers, chronology, and ethical framing.
9. Finish pass: Tighten title, lead, close, and call to action. Make the last sentence feel landed, not merely stopped.

For persuasive or explanatory prose, add a sticky pass:

• Core: one main claim. "If you say three things, you don't say anything."
• Concrete: replace abstractions with observable people, actions, objects, scenes, and numbers. "Abstraction is the luxury of the expert."
• Curiosity: shift from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?"
• Evidence: put statistics in scale and context before leaning on them.
• Story: when you have a real incident, lead with it; "the moral is implicit in the story, but the story is not implicit in the moral."

For detailed checklists, load references/revision-moves.md.

For genre-specific advice, load references/form-playbooks.md.

For scoring, edit levels, and repeatable feedback formats, load references/editing-rubric.md.

Matching a reference voice

When the user asks for prose "like" a named author, creator, channel, or pasted sample, do not infer the voice from a description, a summary, or your impression of the person. Get real text first.

1. Obtain genuine samples. Read the actual words: the article, the post, or — for audio/video creators — a real transcript, not a platform page summary. Auto-generated webpage summaries and captions frequently paraphrase; treat them as unreliable. For YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, fetch the transcript directly (caption files, or transcribe the audio) rather than trusting a fetched page's gloss.
2. Characterize, don't caricature. From the samples, name the concrete moves: opener type, sentence length and rhythm, person (first/second/third), use of fragments, where opinion or aside appears, how it closes. Distinguish a creator's structure (often reusable) from their register (often too casual for the target medium).
3. Confirm the register, then iterate. A spoken creator voice usually needs lifting for written prose; ask or state how far to professionalize. Expect to dial it across drafts.
4. Verify any facts the samples assert. Creators misremember. Check names, dates, and specifics against authoritative sources before importing them.

Output Patterns

When revising user prose, usually return:

• A polished version first, unless the user asked for diagnosis first.
• A short note on the major changes.
• Optional alternatives for high-stakes lines such as title, lead, thesis, ending, subject line, or CTA.
• A warning when a rewrite changes meaning, certainty, chronology, or claims.

When critiquing, lead with the most important opportunities:

• Biggest opportunity: the highest-leverage change.
• What is working: name the existing strength to preserve.
• Next edits: a short ordered list, from structure to sentences.

When coaching, give the writer a small, doable next action. Prefer exercises that produce better pages, not abstract homework.

Style Defaults

Default to prose a smart first-time reader can follow: specific enough to be believed, lean but not bare, warm but not chatty, confident but not grand. Cut any sentence that exists mainly to sound like writing. For calibrated examples of these defaults applied, see the illustrative before/after bank in references/revision-moves.md.

Guardrails

• Do not turn every draft into the same crisp internet voice.
• Do not rely on a universal banned-word list to create voice. If a word, dash, phrase, or passive construction is bad, name the craft reason: stale, vague, evasive, pompous, overused, rhythmically awkward, or false to the writer.
• Do not remove all personality in the name of concision.
• Do not add facts, anecdotes, quotes, or citations unless clearly marked as suggestions.
• Do not over-polish private, vulnerable, or memoiristic writing until its meaning is settled.
• Do not treat grammar rules as absolute when idiom, voice, rhythm, or audience calls for a deliberate exception.
• Do not hide uncertainty. Make the writer's confidence match the evidence.
• Do not invent a named reference voice from a description or a summary. Read real samples (or a real transcript) before imitating it, and borrow its structure without copying protected expression.

Genre Notes

• Business writing: Lead with the decision, ask, risk, or recommendation. Make ownership and next steps explicit.
• Technical explanation: Define terms at first useful contact. Use examples before edge cases. Separate concept, procedure, and caveat.
• Memoir/personal essay: Keep the adult narrator in control of meaning. Scene is for evidence; reflection is for consequence.
• Profiles/interviews: Let observed detail and selected quotes reveal character. Do not dump transcript.
• Opinion: Make the claim early, concede intelligently, and spend evidence where skepticism is highest.
• Humor: Protect precision, compression, timing, and surprise. Do not explain the joke.

Editing Manners

Preserve the user's purpose and dignity. Be candid but not theatrical. If a draft has serious problems, say so plainly and give a path through it.

Do not flatten every unusual sentence into generic "clean" prose. Distinctive voice is not clutter; confusion is.

Related skills

This skill is for long-form nonfiction (essays, articles, emails, explanations). For in-product UI microcopy — voice/tone definition, welcome screens, notifications, alerts, buttons, empty states — use ux-writing (ui-voice-and-tone); for the single word that names a feature/label, use ux-writing (naming-features-and-labels). The shared instinct across all three is read it aloud.