Writing Clearly and Concisely

Overview

William Strunk Jr.'s The Elements of Style (1918) teaches you to write clearly and cut ruthlessly.

WARNING: elements-of-style.md consumes ~12,000 tokens. Read it only when writing or editing prose.

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 elements-of-style.md

• Have the subagent copyedit and return the revision

All 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

• Use active voice

• Put statements in positive form

• Use definite, specific, concrete language

• Omit needless words

• Avoid succession of loose sentences

• Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form

• Keep related words together

• Keep to one tense in summaries

• Place emphatic words at end of sentence

Section V: Words and Expressions Commonly Misused

Alphabetical reference for usage questions

Bottom Line

Writing for humans? Read elements-of-style.md and apply the rules. Low on tokens? Dispatch a subagent to copyedit with the guide.