Writing Clearly And Concisely Agent Skill
Use when writing prose humans will read—documentation, commit messages, error messages, explanations, reports, or UI text. Applies Strunk's timeless rules for clearer, stronger, more professional writing.
Install
one command, takes just this skill from the repositorynpx skills add https://github.com/softaworks/agent-toolkit --skill writing-clearly-and-conciselyThe instruction itself
9 sections, as written by the authorWriting Clearly and Concisely
Overview
Write with clarity and force. This skill covers what to do (Strunk) and what not to do (AI patterns).
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
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 the relevant section file
- Have the subagent copyedit and return the revision
Loading a single section (~1,000-4,500 tokens) instead of everything saves significant context.
Elements of Style
William Strunk Jr.'s *The Elements of Style* (1918) teaches you to write clearly and cut ruthlessly.
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
10. Use active voice
11. Put statements in positive form
12. Use definite, specific, concrete language
13. Omit needless words
14. Avoid succession of loose sentences
15. Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form
16. Keep related words together
17. Keep to one tense in summaries
18. Place emphatic words at end of sentence
Reference Files
The rules above are summarized from Strunk's original text. For complete explanations with examples:
| Section | File | ~Tokens |
|---------|------|---------|
| Grammar, punctuation, comma rules | 02-elementary-rules-of-usage.md | 2,500 |
| Paragraph structure, active voice, concision | 03-elementary-principles-of-composition.md | 4,500 |
| Headings, quotations, formatting | 04-a-few-matters-of-form.md | 1,000 |
| Word choice, common errors | 05-words-and-expressions-commonly-misused.md | 4,000 |
Most tasks need only 03-elementary-principles-of-composition.md — it covers active voice, positive form, concrete language, and omitting needless words.
AI Writing Patterns to Avoid
LLMs regress to statistical means, producing generic, puffy prose. Avoid:
- Puffery: pivotal, crucial, vital, testament, enduring legacy
- Empty "-ing" phrases: ensuring reliability, showcasing features, highlighting capabilities
- Promotional adjectives: groundbreaking, seamless, robust, cutting-edge
- Overused AI vocabulary: delve, leverage, multifaceted, foster, realm, tapestry
- Formatting overuse: excessive bullets, emoji decorations, bold on every other word
Be specific, not grandiose. Say what it actually does.
For comprehensive research on why these patterns occur, see signs-of-ai-writing.md. Wikipedia editors developed this guide to detect AI-generated submissions — their patterns are well-documented and field-tested.
Bottom Line
Writing for humans? Load the relevant section from elements-of-style/ and apply the rules. For most tasks, 03-elementary-principles-of-composition.md covers what matters most.
Other skills for the same job
different authors, same section of the catalogue
Guide users through a structured workflow for co-authoring documentation. Use when user wants to write documentation, proposals, technical specs, decision docs, or similar structured content. This workflow helps users efficiently transfer context, refine content through iteration, and verify the doc works for readers. Trigger when user mentions writing docs, creating proposals, drafting specs, or similar documentation tasks.
Automatically creates user-facing changelogs from git commits by analyzing commit history, categorizing changes, and transforming technical commits into clear, customer-friendly release notes. Turns hours of manual changelog writing into minutes of automated generation.
Use when implementing any feature or bugfix, before writing implementation code
Use when you have a spec or requirements for a multi-step task, before touching code
Use when creating new skills, editing existing skills, or verifying skills work before deployment
Official Opentrons Protocol API for OT-2 and Flex robots. Use when writing protocols specifically for Opentrons hardware with full access to Protocol API v2 features. Best for production Opentrons protocols, official API compatibility. For multi-vendor automation or broader equipment control use pylabrobot.
Systematically evaluate scholarly work using the ScholarEval framework, providing structured assessment across research quality dimensions including problem formulation, methodology, analysis, and writing with quantitative scoring and actionable feedback.
Behavioral guidelines to reduce common LLM coding mistakes. Use when writing, reviewing, or refactoring code to avoid overcomplication, make surgical changes, surface assumptions, and define verifiable success criteria.
How to use it
Take softaworks/writing-clearly-and-concisely from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal
use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.
The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the
same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.