writing-clearly-and-conciselylisted

# Writing Clearly and Concisely ## Overview William Strunk Jr.'s *The Elements of Style* (1918) teaches you to write clearly and cut ruthlessly. **Path base:** Relative paths in this document are rooted at this skill's directory, `${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/writing-clearly-and-concisely/`, where `${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}` is the installed groundwork plugin directory, not the working directory at run time. **WARNING:** `elements-of-style.md` (the full 1918 text) 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.** **Scope:** Rules 1–7 are English grammar and punctuation rules and apply only to English prose. Rules 8–18 are composition principles that hold in any language. When writing in another language, apply 8–18 here and load that language's own sentence-level skill if your agent runtime provides one. ## All Rules Bold marks the rules violated most often. Check those first; the rest still apply. ### 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. C