write-prose

write-prose

Invoke this skill for any English you produce in this project: commits, comments, docstrings, ADRs, design docs, skill bodies, changelog, error messages, project guides. If you are about to write a sentence of prose, invoke this first.

Read this before writing: skills/shared/references/style-foundations.md, the canonical craft reference. It distills Strunk and White's Elements of Style and Zinsser's On Writing Well into the eight load-bearing rules, and catalogs the AI tells the project bans.

Also read for project-specific surfaces: skills/shared/references/prose-style.md, the project's surface conventions (commit format, ADR format, code-comment idioms, the no-process-ID rule).

The stance: terse, humanized, no tells

Write like a person who respects the reader's time. Not like a machine hedging its output. The default failure mode for AI prose is over-production: too many words, decorative em dashes, sympathetic throat-clearing, false-affinity adjectives (powerful, robust, seamless). Reject that default at every sentence.

The four non-negotiables:

1. Terse. Omit needless words. The first draft is too long; the second is shorter. If a sentence can be cut and lose no meaning, cut it.
2. Humanized. Write like a careful person, not a helpful machine. No apologetic throat-clearing, no false brightness. No filler.
3. No em dashes. Never the em dash character. Restructure: a comma, a colon, a period, or a rewrite. Reaching for the em dash means the sentence is doing too much.
4. No AI tells. No arrow in prose, no hand-written or hand-rolled, no false-affinity adjectives, no hollow hedging, no rhetorical-question transitions, no in order to (just to), no utilize or leverage (just use), no There is openers, no trendy intensifiers (really, very, super). The full catalog is in style-foundations.md.

The voice (every surface)

• Plain, direct, technical. No metaphors, no cleverness in names or headings. A reader six months from now gets the plain meaning on first read.
• Active voice; present tense for current behavior, past tense for history.
• State constraints and effects, not narrative.
• No marketing adjectives. If a property matters, state the measurement or the mechanism.
• Factual, neutral, accurate. State what the thing is and what it does, not how it feels or how exciting it is. No editorial comparisons ("improves on X"); state the factual difference and let the reader judge.