Use when writing prose humans will read—documentation, commit messages, error messages, explanations, reports, or UI text. Applies Strunk's timeless rules for clearer, stronger, more professional writing.
If you're writing sentences for a human to read, use this skill.
Limited Context Strategy
When context is tight:
Write your draft using judgment
Dispatch a subagent with your draft and the relevant section file
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):
Form possessive singular by adding 's
Use comma after each term in series except last
Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas
Comma before conjunction introducing co-ordinate clause
Don't join independent clauses by comma
Don't break sentences in two
Participial phrase at beginning refers to grammatical subject
Elementary Principles of Composition:
One paragraph per topic
Begin paragraph with topic sentence
Use active voice
Put statements in positive form
Use definite, specific, concrete language
Omit needless words
Avoid succession of loose sentences
Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form
Keep related words together
Keep to one tense in summaries
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
Most tasks need only 03-elementary-principles-of-composition.md — it covers active voice, positive form, concrete language, and omitting needless words.
AI Writing Patterns to Avoid
LLMs regress to statistical means, producing generic, puffy prose. Avoid:
Overused AI vocabulary: delve, leverage, multifaceted, foster, realm, tapestry
Formatting overuse: excessive bullets, emoji decorations, bold on every other word
Be specific, not grandiose. Say what it actually does.
For comprehensive research on why these patterns occur, see signs-of-ai-writing.md. Wikipedia editors developed this guide to detect AI-generated submissions — their patterns are well-documented and field-tested.
Bottom Line
Writing for humans? Load the relevant section from elements-of-style/ and apply the rules. For most tasks, 03-elementary-principles-of-composition.md covers what matters most.