writing-clearly-and-concisely_skill

Overview

This skill applies William Strunk Jr.'s Elements of Style rules to any prose humans will read. It focuses on clarity, brevity, active voice, and concrete language to make writing stronger and more professional. Use it to edit or generate copy that communicates efficiently and accurately.

How this skill works

The skill inspects prose for common style and usage problems: passive constructions, needless words, vague terms, punctuation and grammar issues, and paragraph structure. It suggests edits that enforce active voice, positive phrasing, definite language, consistent tense, and proper sentence and paragraph organization. When context is limited, it accepts a draft and returns a focused copyedit that follows these rules.

When to use it

• Writing or editing documentation, READMEs, and technical explanations
• Composing commit messages, pull request descriptions, or change logs
• Crafting error messages, UI copy, help text, or notifications
• Preparing reports, summaries, or executive explanations
• Polishing comments, code-level prose, or any human-facing sentence

Best practices

• Start each paragraph with a clear topic sentence and keep one idea per paragraph
• Prefer active voice and positive statements to improve clarity
• Choose definite, specific, and concrete words; remove vague modifiers
• Omit needless words—if a word or sentence adds no value, cut it
• Keep related words together and place emphasis at sentence ends

Example use cases

• Transform a long, passive technical paragraph into concise active sentences for docs
• Shorten and clarify an oversized commit message so the intent is obvious
• Rewrite cryptic error text into a short actionable message for users
• Edit a product summary to emphasize benefits using concrete language
• Convert a loose multi-topic paragraph into a focused, topic-sentence-led paragraph