writing-clearly-and-concisely — Claude Code skill: plain prose

What writing-clearly-and-concisely does

The skill kicks in whenever the agent writes something a person will read: documentation, README files, pull request descriptions, commit messages, error text, UI copy, reports. It carries a summary of William Strunk Jr.'s rules from “The Elements of Style” — active voice, positive statements, definite and concrete wording, no needless words, one topic per paragraph, the emphatic word last. A second section lists the tells of machine-written text to drop: puffed-up adjectives, empty phrases built on participles, promotional vocabulary, tired words like “leverage” and “delve”, bullets and emoji everywhere.

The rules sit in four files under elements-of-style/: grammar and punctuation, principles of composition, matters of form, and commonly misused words. Most jobs need only the composition file, which covers active voice, concrete language and cutting words. There is also a trick for tight context: write the draft as usual, then hand it to a subagent along with the one relevant section instead of the whole set.

Nothing here runs a linter or checks your output. The skill is an instruction to the model, so what you get depends on the text you asked it to write.