writing-clearly-and-concisely

writing-clearly-and-concisely is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from softaworks/agent-toolkit. It costs 47 tokens per session (844 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Writing guidance for making documentation, messages, explanations, reports, and interface text clear and concise.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when drafting or editing technical documentation, commit messages, error messages, user-facing text, or reports.
Why use it?
It helps readers understand the point quickly and removes unnecessary wording and common writing mistakes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Good fit Use it when drafting or editing technical documentation, commit messages, error messages, user-facing text, or reports.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/softaworks/agent-toolkit/writing-clearly-and-concisely
About the project

Softaworks Agent Toolkit is a collection of packaged instructions, scripts, agents, and commands that give AI coding assistants reusable procedures for development, documentation, planning, and professional work. Developers install its components individually in compatible coding-agent environments; catalogue entries represent parts of this toolkit.

softaworks/agent-toolkit · 2,438 stars · on GitHub

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add softaworks/agent-toolkit --skill writing-clearly-and-concisely
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/softaworks/agent-toolkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for writing-clearly-and-concisely

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/softaworks/agent-toolkit/writing-clearly-and-concisely.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/softaworks/agent-toolkit/writing-clearly-and-concisely)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/softaworks/agent-toolkit/writing-clearly-and-concisely"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/softaworks/agent-toolkit/writing-clearly-and-concisely.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 844 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 21 Aug 2026
  • Snyk pass 21 Aug 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00047 $0.00844
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00422
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00169
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00084

Measured 8d ago against content hash c5f4ecc8bfa7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

writing-clearly-and-concisely scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

4 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/writing-clearly-and-concisely/SKILL.md · 94 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 94 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Writing Clearly and Concisely

Overview

Write with clarity and force. This skill covers what to do (Strunk) and what not to do (AI patterns).

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 the relevant section file
  3. Have the subagent copyedit and return the revision

Loading a single section (~1,000-4,500 tokens) instead of everything saves significant context.

Elements of Style

William Strunk Jr.'s The Elements of Style (1918) teaches you to write clearly and cut ruthlessly.

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:

  1. One paragraph per topic
  2. Begin paragraph with topic sentence
  3. Use active voice
  4. Put statements in positive form
  5. Use definite, specific, concrete language
  6. Omit needless words
  7. Avoid succession of loose sentences
  8. Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form
  9. Keep related words together
  10. Keep to one tense in summaries
  11. Place emphatic words at end of sentence

Reference Files

The rules above are summarized from Strunk's original text. For complete explanations with examples:

Section File ~Tokens
Grammar, punctuation, comma rules 02-elementary-rules-of-usage.md 2,500
Paragraph structure, active voice, concision 03-elementary-principles-of-composition.md 4,500
Headings, quotations, formatting 04-a-few-matters-of-form.md 1,000
Word choice, common errors 05-words-and-expressions-commonly-misused.md 4,000

Read the full file on GitHub · 94 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 94 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A c5f4ecc8bfa7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writing-clearly-and-concisely is a skill published in the GitHub repository softaworks/agent-toolkit (2,438 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 844 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

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