| name | prose-register |
| description | Register for essays, posts, and long-form prose in the author's voice: plain, warm, concrete, with breath between the hard lines. Use when drafting or editing an essay or blog post; when a draft reads clipped, cold, or relentless; when an editing pass has flattened the warmth out of something; or when the user asks for prose that sounds like them rather than like a style contract. |
Prose Register
Do not announce the skill. Produce the prose.
The rule the rest hangs on
A hard line needs a breath next to it. Vary the pressure, not only the length. Three
declaratives in a row are a drumbeat; the fourth one lands only if the third let up.
When a paragraph is all jab, the reader stops feeling any of it.
The baseline
- No em-dashes. Full stops, semicolons, parentheses, en-dashes.
- Concrete nouns over abstractions. Strong verbs over adverbs.
- Short sentences as impact. They are punctuation, never the baseline.
- No throat-clearing, no "In today's world", no "It's important to note".
- No therapy voice. No meta ("in this essay", "as a writer").
- Open with substance. Close without summary.
Moves other style guides ban
"Not X, but Y" is allowed. It is the signature move. It earns its place when the
reversal is the argument, not when it is a pivot for rhythm.
not unreviewed code, but un-authored knowledge, severed from any knower
The unease was never that the work is bad. It is that the work no longer implies a worker.
Questions may warm, not only cut.
How do you make sociology approachable to an engineer? Pretend it's math.
Three-part lists are fine when the last item does work the first two don't.
throwaway games, little toys, a script I will run once and never think about again
The third item is rueful and specific; the first two are setup. Contrast a failure:
"remix, retool, reimagine". Alliterative, decorative, three ways of saying one thing.
Connectives are joints, not filler. "Which raises the question:", "Therefore,", "Yes,",
"But if I ask you to…". They give the reader somewhere to breathe. Cut the scene-setting;
keep the joints.
Hedges of precision stay. Hedges of cowardice go.
- Keep: "roughly $165,000", "usually sufficient", "mostly it looks like revision"
- Cut: "because I believe that", "a decent amount of time", "I think maybe"
Prohibitions
- No flex. Never a sentence that flatters the writer. If a line's real work is showing how generous or sharp you are, cut it.
- Never claim the reader's reaction. Make the case and stop. No "this is why you can trust me". Trust is the reader's to award.
- No grandiosity. Don't grant a machine a stake it cannot have.
- Nothing floral. "The people who lit my path" is a costume.
- Keep the "I". Agentless policy prose loses the pledge. "The rule applies equally" lost to "I don't apply a quieter rule for probabilistic character generators".
- "Just" is banned as a modifier. It stacks the deck.
- No jargon without definition. Big words are fine when they're accessible; the ban is on words that wall a reader out, not on vocabulary.
Where the breath comes from
Delight here is specific and a little self-aware. It is never punchy.
- Comic understatement: miss, and the whole disaster is a cup on the floor
- A human detail: nights and weekends and too much coffee
- Rueful specificity: a script that scratches an itch and never runs again
- A joke at your own expense, before anyone else makes it: I'm sure about this because I've
been the villain of it.
- A joke that lands the argument rather than decorating it: Slop, ironically, is sloppy.
Lint
Fail the draft if any is true:
- A paragraph of jabs with no breath in it.
- Five consecutive sentences of similar length or similar pressure.
- Any sentence that flatters the writer.
- Any claim about what the reader will feel, conclude, or trust.
- An em-dash. "Just" as a modifier.
- A triplet whose third item adds nothing the first two didn't.
- A hedge that protects the writer rather than the fact.
- A reversal used for cleverness rather than argument.
