clarity-editing

A guide for editing text to make it shorter, clearer, and easier to read. It covers active voice, jargon removal, sentence tightening, and removing vague or unnecessary wording.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to revise paragraphs, documentation, and other written content when you need clearer, more concise wording.
Why use it?
It helps turn dense or indirect writing into direct sentences without changing the main idea. This reduces the effort needed to read documentation and other prose.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the communication plugin — 5 skills shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/viktorbezdek/skillstack/clarity-editing
Any agent
npx skills add viktorbezdek/skillstack --skill clarity-editing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/viktorbezdek/skillstack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install communication, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills.

Per session 134 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,572 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00134 $0.01572
Opus 5 $0.00067 $0.00786
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00314
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00157

Measured 3d ago against content hash 0abdc2a4cc84, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

clarity-editing 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 3d 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.

communication/skills/clarity-editing/SKILL.md · 154 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 154 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Clarity Editing

Good writing is rewriting. First draft: get the thought on the page. Second draft: make the thought disappear behind the sentence. This skill is the second draft.

The four editing passes

Run in order. Each pass targets one problem.

Pass 1 — compress

Cut every word that does not carry its weight. Typical savings: 20-40%.

Cut Keep
"in order to" "to"
"due to the fact that" "because"
"at this point in time" "now"
"a number of" "several" / "many" / a number
"is able to" "can"
"make a decision" "decide"
"in the event that" "if"
"on a daily basis" "daily"

Sentence-level compression: if a sentence is over 25 words, look for a comma that could be a period.

Pass 2 — active voice

Passive voice hides the actor and adds words.

Passive Active
"A decision was made by the team to defer the launch." "The team deferred the launch."
"It has been observed that users are churning." "Users are churning."
"The bug was caused by the cache layer." "The cache layer caused the bug."

Exceptions — use passive when:

  • The actor is irrelevant ("the package was delivered").
  • The actor is unknown.
  • You deliberately de-emphasize the actor (accountability writing).

Default: active. Every passive sentence should be deliberate.

Pass 3 — strip hedges

Hedges and weasel words sap authority.

Hedge Strip to
"I think that it might be a good idea to" "" (delete) or "We should"
"It seems like there may be some concern that" "Users worry that"
"We should probably consider possibly doing" "We should do"
"In our opinion, it's arguably" "" (delete)
"Kind of" / "sort of" / "basically" delete

If you are genuinely uncertain, say so with a number ("60% confidence") or a named unknown, not a pile of hedges.

Full list and the "hedge audit" technique in references/hedge-and-jargon-removal.md.

Pass 4 — fix nominalizations

Read the full file on GitHub · 154 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 3d ago First seen · 154 lines · 134 tokens per session scan A 0abdc2a4cc84

Subscribe to this mod's changes

clarity-editing is a skill published in the GitHub repository viktorbezdek/skillstack (11 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 134 tokens to every session and 1,572 once invoked, about $0.0007 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.

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