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.
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---
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.
metadata:
category: superpowers
agents: codex, pi
---
# 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.
