prose-style

name

prose-style

description

Use when writing, editing, or reviewing prose bodies in `content/`, or when the corpus needs a typography pass. Triggers include "there are em dashes in the content", "clean up the punctuation", "check the prose style", "does this read like the rest of the corpus", "this entry sounds like a model wrote it", "the voice is off in this entry", "which entries have typographic drift", "add a style gate to CI", after a bulk populate run, or before merging a batch of new or rewritten entries.

Prose Style

Overview

1,696 markdown bodies were written across many populate sessions, and nothing in the build or the test suite reads a single character of prose. lib/content-integrity.ts validates slugs and cross-references. lib/sigil-integrity.ts validates art. Zod validates frontmatter shape. Punctuation is unchecked, so it drifted, and it drifted in exactly one direction.

Measured across all seven collections before this skill landed:

Check	Result
Long dashes (em U+2014, en U+2013)	438 across 232 files
Smart quotes and primes	0
Double spaces between words	0
Trailing whitespace	0
Non-ASCII beyond accented Latin letters	0
Named weapons left unitalicised	14

That shape is the whole insight. The corpus is not sloppy: it is clean on every axis but one. 435 of the 438 long dashes were em dashes, and the em dash is the single strongest surface marker of unedited model prose. The repo owner bans both dashes absolutely, in content and in code, so every one of them was a live violation that no gate would ever have caught.

check-prose.ts in this directory finds them. It is read-only and rewrites nothing. Removing a dash is a judgment call, not a substitution, which is why the script reports and stops.

Where the drift sat

Collection	Files	Files with a long dash	Long dashes	Share of files
events	53	38	70	72%
weapons	30	7	8	23%
characters	920	145	267	16%
houses	468	36	85	8%
castles	146	6	8	4%
battles	72	0	0	0%
dragons	7	0	0	0%

All three en dashes were in content/characters/, all three in the same year range (59 to 60 AC).

battles and dragons were already clean. They are the reference voice, not an accident of size. Read content/battles/battle-of-the-blackwater.md and content/characters/jon-snow.md before writing anything in this repo.

The house voice

Rule	Detail
Register	Third-person encyclopedia. Never "you", never "we", never address the reader.
Tense	Past for history. Present for standing facts and for the state of the world at the opening of the books ("Bear Island is held by Jeor's sister").
Hedging	None. "It is said", "the maesters record", "the singers tell" are sourcing and are house style. "Perhaps", "arguably", "it seems" are hedging.
Italics	_underscore italics_ for named weapons, named dragons, and book titles (_A Feast for Crows_). Never asterisks; remark renders both, the corpus uses one.
Quotes	Straight " and ' only.
Dashes	Hyphens only. No em dash, no en dash, anywhere, including frontmatter strings.
Citation	Facts come from AWOIAF. The sources frontmatter carries the citation; the prose never links out or names a URL.
Paragraphing	Two to four long paragraphs for a populated entry, one for a thin one. No headings inside content/characters/ or content/houses/ bodies.

The violation classes

Kind	What it catches	What to do
em-dash	U+2014	Rephrase, never substitute. See the next section.
en-dash	U+2013	Rephrase. A year range becomes "59 to 60 AC", the form the corpus already uses elsewhere.
smart-quote	Curly quotes, low quotes, primes	Swap for the straight equivalent. This one is a safe mechanical fix.
double-space	Two or more spaces wedged between words	Collapse to one. Leading YAML indentation is never flagged.
trailing-space	Whitespace at end of line	Strip it.
non-ascii	Any codepoint outside ASCII that is not an accented Latin letter	Almost always a pasted ellipsis or a non-breaking space. Replace with the ASCII form.
bare-weapon	A named weapon the corpus italicises elsewhere, left bare here	Wrap it in _..._.

The first six rules run over frontmatter as well as body. Four content/events/ entries carried a dash inside an outcome: string. Rephrase the string exactly as you would prose; never touch a key, a slug, or the quoting style.

Accented Latin letters are allowed on purpose. The corpus legitimately carries an acute accent in tenne, rayonne and nee. Everything else outside ASCII is drift.

Removing a dash without leaving a scar

Blind substitution is the failure mode. Replacing every dash with a comma manufactures comma splices and buries appositives inside sentences that already carry four commas. Work out what the dash is doing, then pick the mark that does the same job.

The banned character is written [dash] in the examples below so this file stays clean.

What the dash is doing	Recast with
Introducing a noun phrase that renames what precedes it	comma
Introducing a complete independent clause	semicolon, or a full stop and a new sentence
Wrapping an aside mid-sentence (paired dashes)	parentheses, or a comma on each side
Introducing a list whose items already carry commas	parentheses
Marking a contrast or a turn	comma, or a full stop
Joining a year range	the word "to"

Worked examples, all taken from the fix:

Appositive, so a comma.

• Before: when Lannister forces broke its walls [dash] the same column under Ser Gregor Clegane that took Barbara from the rubble.
• After: when Lannister forces broke its walls, the same column under Ser Gregor Clegane that took Barbara from the rubble.

Independent clause, so a semicolon.

• Before: The babe was frail in her cradle and tall in her childhood [dash] by sixteen she stood an inch short of six feet.
• After: The babe was frail in her cradle and tall in her childhood; by sixteen she stood an inch short of six feet.

Paired aside carrying its own commas, so parentheses.

• Before: She bore him five trueborn children [dash] Jonnel One-Eye, Edric, Lyanna, Barthogan Blacksword, and Brandon [dash] and through them every Stark of Winterfell descends.
• After: She bore him five trueborn children (Jonnel One-Eye, Edric, Lyanna, Barthogan Blacksword, and Brandon), and through them every Stark of Winterfell descends.

Sentence already comma-heavy, so break it.

• Before: held at the altar to ensure her vows came out right [dash] she was the youngest of the three so-called Black Brides he wed in one night.
• After: held at the altar to ensure her vows came out right. She was the youngest of the three so-called Black Brides he wed in one night.

Long trailing gloss, so fold it in rather than stack another clause.

• Before: reckoned the most beautiful of all the queen's daughters [dash] deep purple eyes, silver-gold hair, flawless white skin, a grace uncanny in one so young.
• After: reckoned the most beautiful of all the queen's daughters, with deep purple eyes, silver-gold hair, flawless white skin, and a grace uncanny in one so young.

Rules of thumb:

• If the sentence already carries three or more commas, do not add a fourth. Break it or use parentheses.
• A new sentence may take a two-word subject ("It was", "He was", "They are") to stand up. That is a recast, not an invention.
• Never let the recast change who or what an appositive attaches to. That is the one way this edit silently changes a fact.
• Preserve meaning exactly. No facts added, dropped, or reordered.

The weapon italics rule derives itself

The rule is not a hardcoded list. buildWeaponRules reads content/weapons/ and keeps a name only when both hold:

1. Some body in the corpus already writes it as _Name_. That is what makes italics the established convention for that blade rather than the script's opinion.
2. The name does not appear inside the name or aliases of any non-weapon entry.

Condition 2 is what makes the check safe. It drops Blackfyre (House Blackfyre, three Blackfyre Rebellions, five Blackfyre pretenders), Dawn (the Great Empire of the Dawn, the War for the Dawn, and by extension every "Dawn Age") and Ice (the Battle of Ice). Without it the check would rewrite prose about houses, wars and eras as if it were prose about swords: Blackfyre alone appears bare 134 times and almost none of them are the sword.

What survives is eight surface forms, of which five ever fire: Longclaw, Orphan-Maker, Dark Sister, Lady Forlorn, and Brightroar.

Three further exclusions, all measured from the corpus rather than assumed:

• A weapon's own entry is skipped. No content/weapons/*.md body italicises its own name anywhere. That is the convention, not drift.
• Headings are skipped. ## Lady Forlorn in content/castles/hearts-home.md is a section label.
• Text already inside _..._ is skipped, including a name that falls inside a longer emphasis span.

Known limitation: a blade the corpus has never italicised is never flagged. Heartsbane, Oathkeeper, Widow's Wail, Red Rain and Nightfall are all bare everywhere, so the script has no evidence of a convention and stays quiet. Italicising them is a content decision, not a drift fix.

Quick reference

# whole corpus, human-readable
bun .claude/skills/prose-style/check-prose.ts

# one collection at a time
bun .claude/skills/prose-style/check-prose.ts --collection houses

# machine-readable, for batching a fix
bun .claude/skills/prose-style/check-prose.ts --json

# grep-level spot check on a single file
grep -nP '[\x{2013}\x{2014}]' content/houses/stark.md

Run from the repo root. It resolves @/lib/content through tsconfig.json paths, so it reads the same loaders and Zod schemas the site does. It takes about a second over all 1,696 files.

Exit codes: 0 clean, 1 violations found, 2 bad --collection argument. The 1 is deliberate, so the command can be dropped into the CI check script as a gate once the corpus is clean.

Output is grouped by file with line:column, a kind, the offending text, and a 84-character window of context:

content/castles/claw-isle.md
    23:70   em-dash        "-"  ...over a castle famed for its treasures [dash] Myrish carpets, Valyrian glass...

Batching a large fix

For a sweep on the scale of the original 232 files, partition by file and run parallel agents, one disjoint file set each. Files are independent, there is no shared state, and nothing needs a lock. Do not partition by violation: two agents editing different dashes in the same paragraph will clobber each other.

Re-run the checker after the sweep rather than trusting the reports. It is the only thing that counts.

Common mistakes

Mistake	Why it goes wrong
sed-ing every dash to a comma	Manufactures comma splices and misattached appositives. Every one of the 438 needed reading.
Substituting a dash with " - "	A spaced hyphen is not a house-style mark and renders as a hyphen mid-sentence. Use a real punctuation mark.
Assuming a dash only appears in prose	Four content/events/ entries had one inside an outcome: frontmatter string. The checker reads frontmatter for exactly that reason.
Treating a hyphen as a violation	Orphan-Maker, silver-gold, master-at-arms and every slug use hyphens. Only U+2013 and U+2014 are banned.
Fixing the dash and quietly polishing the surrounding sentence	Balloons the diff and hides the real change from review. Change only what the checker flags.
Adding an em dash to a SKILL.md, a commit message, or a PR body	The ban is absolute and applies to everything written in this repo, not only to content/.
Italicising every weapon name found in prose	Blackfyre, Dawn and Ice are also a house, two eras and a battle. The collision filter exists for that; do not widen it by hand.
Italicising a weapon on its own entry page	No weapon entry names itself in italics. That is the measured convention.
Expecting bun run test to catch any of this	It never has. The suite covers schemas, cross-references and sigils, and reads no prose.

Related skills

• populate-character and populate-house: write the prose in the first place; both should be read alongside the voice table above
• content-triage: picks which entries to write next
• sigil-audit: the same read-only, report-and-stop shape applied to art wiring