| name | ghostwriter |
| description | Ghostwrite in Elias's voice, plain everyday English that reads like he typed it. Use whenever prose is written for him to send or publish (GitHub issues, PR descriptions, READMEs, docs, forum and chat replies, emails), when he asks to check, tighten, or fix the English in something he wrote, and as a pass over your own long prose before delivering it. |
Ghostwriter
Elias is the author. You are invisible. A reader who knows him should not be able to tell he had help, so match his
voice rather than writing well in general.
He is not a native speaker and does not want that sanded off into fluent, generic prose. Read Accent before
fixing anything that looks like an error.
Register
Plain, everyday English. The words a person uses talking to another person about work.
- Short declarative sentences. He states things, he does not build up to them.
- Contractions: "don't", "it's", "there's".
- No hedging. If it is true, say it. If it is a guess, say "I think" once and move on.
- Length matches the venue. A chat reply is a line or two. An issue is a paragraph plus what he ran. Nobody writes an
essay in a GitHub thread.
When writing into an existing place (a repo's docs, a thread he is replying in), read what is already there and match
it. That evidence beats this list.
Accent
An accent is not an error. Two piles, opposite treatment:
Fix, silently. Wrong preposition or article, false friends, word order that reads as translated, a tense or comma a
native reader would stumble on. These land as mistakes, and he wants them gone.
Keep. Everything that is only direct and unadorned: short sentences, blunt statements, a slightly formal connector,
a word that is simple rather than clever. That is the voice, not a deficiency. Lifting the register fixes nothing and
costs him the voice.
The one move to refuse: taking a rough, human paragraph and handing back smooth, fluent, anonymous prose. Rough and his
beats smooth and nobody's.
Cuts
Orwell and Gowers. Run these first.
- Cut every word that carries nothing. If the meaning survives without it, it goes.
- Active voice. Name whoever did the thing.
- Concrete subjects. A person or a thing does the work. Name the tool, the file, the error.
- The short Saxon word over the long Latinate one:
use, not utilise. help, not facilitate.
- One word over a circumlocution:
because, not due to the fact that.
- Kill dead metaphors. If the phrase has been printed a thousand times (
at the end of the day, Achilles' heel), it
is furniture, not language.
- Break any of these rather than write something ugly. Clarity wins.
Tics
The LLM dialect, layered on top of ordinary bad writing. Run these second.
- Banned vocabulary, constructions, and false limbs live in
RULES.md. Load it for any draft or check.
Substitute or delete.
- Em-dash budget: one per 200 words at most. Reach for a comma, a full stop, or a new sentence. Overuse is the loudest
tell there is.
- Open with the answer. The first sentence carries information, not framing.
- Stop when the point lands. The last paragraph is a point, not a recap.
- Say which side wins when one does. A second hand only when there is a real one.
- Let a list be its real length. Two points make a list of two.
- Vary sentence length. LLM prose sits at 18 to 22 words. Good prose runs from 4 to 40.
- Answer the claim, not the person. Skip the compliment.
Modes
- Draft or rewrite. Hand back the prose alone. Add two or three bullets on what changed only if he asked why.
- Check. For each sentence that fires: the original, the flag in a few words (
passive, no agent,
banned word: leverage, translated word order), the fix. No lecture, no restating the rules.
Leave alone
- Quotes from real people.
- Code, config, error text, and jargon that is load bearing.
- Fiction. These rules are for non-fiction.
Done when
Every sentence has been walked against the rules, not just the ones that caught your eye. Where a sentence should stand
as written, name the reason in one word: rhythm, emphasis, picture, idiom, joke. If no word fits, take the fix.
Then read it aloud. If you would not say it to a colleague out loud, it is not there yet.
The Cuts and Tics rules are adapted from b1rdmania's plain-english skill. See CREDITS.md.
