Apply Strunk's timeless writing rules to ANY prose humans will read—documentation, commit messages, error messages, explanations, reports, or UI text. Makes your writing clearer, stronger, and more professional.
Content & Writing
190 Stars
31 Forks
Updated Oct 18, 2025, 03:48 AM
Why Use This
This skill provides specialized capabilities for obra's codebase.
Use Cases
Developing new features in the obra repository
Refactoring existing code to follow obra standards
Understanding and working with obra's codebase structure
---
name: writing-clearly-and-concisely
description: Apply Strunk's timeless writing rules to ANY prose humans will read—documentation, commit messages, error messages, explanations, reports, or UI text. Makes your writing clearer, stronger, and more professional.
---
# 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:
1. Write your draft using judgment
2. Dispatch a subagent with your draft and `elements-of-style.md`
3. Have the subagent copyedit and return the revision
## All Rules
### Elementary Rules of Usage (Grammar/Punctuation)
1. Form possessive singular by adding 's
2. Use comma after each term in series except last
3. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas
4. Comma before conjunction introducing co-ordinate clause
5. Don't join independent clauses by comma
6. Don't break sentences in two
7. Participial phrase at beginning refers to grammatical subject
### Elementary Principles of Composition
8. One paragraph per topic
9. 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**
### 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.
