new-yorker-style_skill

Overview

This skill captures The New Yorker’s distinctive literary voice for essays, features, profiles, and sophisticated nonfiction. It applies house conventions—diaeresis, British-influenced spellings, serial commas—and promotes elegant sentence rhythm, precision, and courtesy to the reader. Use it to produce urbane, readable prose that balances erudition with warmth.

How this skill works

The skill inspects tone, sentence rhythm, punctuation, and house spellings, transforming text to follow New Yorker norms. It enforces the serial comma, inserts diaereses for doubled vowels (coöperate, reëlect), prefers theatre and other British-influenced spellings, and suggests syntactic variation: long, flowing sentences paired with short, emphatic ones. It flags jargon, sentimentality, passive constructions, and factual claims that need verification.

When to use it

• Writing long-form journalism, profiles, and cultural criticism
• Drafting magazine-quality essays and literary features
• Rewriting copy to a refined, urbane voice
• Preparing submissions that require close editorial tone matching
• Polishing sentences for rhythm and clarity

Best practices

• Prioritise clarity and courtesy: every word must earn its place
• Vary sentence length: follow long, complex sentences with short, punchy ones
• Use em dashes for emphasis and clarity; reserve semicolons for parallel constructions
• Apply house conventions consistently: diaeresis, serial comma, British-influenced spellings
• Fact-check names, dates, quotations, and statistics before publication

Example use cases

• Convert a draft feature into New Yorker–style prose with diaereses and British spellings
• Edit a profile for rhythm: add short sentence punches and link paragraph flow
• Prepare an essay that avoids jargon and explains complex ideas plainly
• Polish a narrative by enforcing serial commas and clarifying hyphenation in phrasal adjectives
• Review copy to identify unverifiable factual claims and suggest verification steps