writing-clearly-and-conciselylisted

# Writing Clearly and Concisely ## 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**: 8. One paragraph per topic 9. Begin paragraph with topic sentence 10. **Use active voice** 11. **Put statements in positive form** 12. **Use definite, specific, concrete language** 13. **Omit needless words** 14. Avoid succession of loose sentences 15. Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form 16. **Keep related words together** 17. Keep to one tense in summaries 18. **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 | |---------|------