| name | prose |
| description | Apply Strunk's writing rules to prose: documentation, commits, error messages, UI text. Clearer, stronger, more professional. Also sharpens and tightens overlong drafts by subtraction. |
Writing Clearly and Concisely
Overview
William Strunk Jr.'s The Elements of Style (1918) teaches you to write clearly and cut ruthlessly.
WARNING: references/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
- Tightening or sharpening a draft that runs long
If you're writing sentences for a human to read, use this skill.
Limited Context Strategy
When context is tight:
- Write your draft using judgment
- Dispatch a subagent with your draft and
references/elements-of-style.md
- Have the subagent copyedit and return the revision
All Rules
Elementary Rules of Usage (Grammar/Punctuation)
- Form possessive singular by adding 's
- Use comma after each term in series except last
- Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas
- Comma before conjunction introducing co-ordinate clause
- Don't join independent clauses by comma
- Don't break sentences in two
- Participial phrase at beginning refers to grammatical subject
Elementary Principles of Composition
- One paragraph per topic
- Begin paragraph with topic sentence
