mimesis-concise

name

mimesis-concise

description

Use when the user wants prose made shorter, tighter, or denser without losing meaning: "make this concise", "tighten this", "cut the fluff", "too wordy", "trim this down", "say it in fewer words". Strips throat-clearing, dutiful summaries, hedging, puffery and redundancy, keeping only what does work. Also removes em dashes and AI tells in passing. Not for expanding, explaining, or re-toning text where length is not the point.

mimesis-concise

Cut prose down to what does work. Where mimesis-human removes the machine fingerprint, this removes the bulk: throat-clearing, dutiful summaries, hedging, puffery and redundancy. The same instinct that keeps code tight, applied to copy. Say the claim once and stop.

Shared machinery

This command rests on the same three-layer stack as mimesis-human.

• L1. Read reference/craft.md (Principle 5, Restraint, is the spine here) and reference/tells.md on every run.

• L2. Run the linter on the input and on your output:

  python3 "$CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT/linter" --json path/to/draft.md
  

  (Outside Claude Code, the linter is at <this-skill-dir>/../../linter.)

  Tightening is not an excuse to leave an em dash or a kill-list word behind. A concise pass still ends on a clean linter result.

• L3. Optional generator, same gate as mimesis-human. See codex.md. Rarely relevant here, since concise works on text that already exists.

What concise cuts

In rough priority order:

• Throat-clearing. The first sentence that warms up instead of starting.
• Dutiful summaries. The closing line that repeats what was just said.
• Hedging. "It's worth noting that", "in many cases", "generally speaking", reflexive qualifiers that lower the temperature without adding information.
• Puffery. "a pivotal moment", "a seismic shift". State what happened.
• Redundancy. Two sentences making one point, doubled adjectives, a clause that restates its own subject.
• Filler connectives. "Furthermore", "in order to" for "to", "due to the fact that" for "because".

What concise keeps: every factual claim, the one specific that carries the point, a varied rhythm, and the input's register. Shortening is not re-registering: a casual note stays casual, a formal one stays formal (see reference/register.md; this skill takes no --register flag). Trimming is not flattening. Do not turn three differently shaped sentences into three identical short ones; that trades wordiness for a new tell. See Principle 1 in craft.md. And concise never introduces a typo or forced error; cutting words never means breaking spelling.

Two modes

Detect from phrasing. Default to rewrite, since "make this concise" is almost always a request to act, not just to measure.

• audit. Read-only. Report where the bulk is, by category and location, with a rough word-count saving for each. No edits.
• rewrite. Produce the tightened text. If the user gave --target N words, hit it or get close and say the final count. Otherwise cut hard but preserve every claim.

Output

audit.

# Concise audit: <short description> (<n> words)

[1] line 1 (throat-clearing): opening sentence adds nothing (~12 words)
[2] line 6 (redundancy): restates line 4 (~20 words)
[3] line 9 (hedging): "it's worth noting that" (~5 words)

Rough saving: ~37 words (<n> to <n>).

rewrite. Return the tightened text only, unless the user asked what changed. If they did, add one line with the before and after word counts and a short list of what you cut. End on a clean linter pass.

What this skill never does

• Drop a factual claim to save words. Concise preserves meaning; it removes padding.
• Flatten every sentence to the same length. Brevity is not monotony.
• Leave an em dash or kill-list word in place because the task was "just length".
• Edit text in audit mode.
• Pad a too-short draft. That is not this command's job.