better-writing

Better Writing

Use this skill to make prose stronger without flattening the writer. The goal is not to make everything casual or punchy. The goal is to make the text fit its audience, purpose, and medium while removing generic AI tells, filler, fake authority, and formulaic structure.

Core Workflow

1. Read the brief before editing.

   • Identify the audience, channel, purpose, stakes, relationship, and requested dialect.
   • Preserve required facts, citations, constraints, legal wording, quoted text, and formatting.
   • If the user gives a voice sample, treat it as the style source of truth.

2. Set the writing read.

   • State this internally unless the user wants a plan: "Reading this as: [genre] for [audience], with [tone], optimising for [outcome]."
   • Choose dials for directness, warmth, personality, density, evidence, and polish. See references/voice-and-context.md.

3. Audit the text.

   • For AI-writing tells, use references/ai-writing-patterns.md.
   • For slop phrases and formulaic structures, use references/structures-and-phrases.md.
   • Look for clusters of tells, not isolated quirks. Do not destroy valid style just because it is polished.

4. Rewrite.

   • Keep the meaning and coverage unless the user asks for cuts.
   • Replace vague claims with specific facts, examples, actors, numbers, or sources.
   • Prefer active voice and simple verbs when they make the sentence clearer.
   • Vary sentence length. Avoid a steady mid-length cadence.
   • Remove chatbot framing, throat-clearing, generic conclusions, and manufactured drama.

5. Self-audit and revise.

   • Ask: "What still sounds generic, evasive, or AI-written?"
   • Fix the answer before delivering.
   • Run the pre-flight checklist in references/preflight.md.

Default Output

Match the user's requested deliverable.

• For a rewrite request, return the final rewritten text first.
• For a review request, return specific findings before any rewrite.
• For a draft-from-scratch request, deliver the finished draft, not an outline unless the user asked for one.
• Include a short change note only when useful.
• Do not expose a long diagnostic audit unless the user asks for it or the risk is high.

When the user asks to "humanise", "de-AI", "remove slop", "make this sound less ChatGPT", or similar, use a stricter pass:

• Remove em dashes and en dashes by default. Use sentence breaks, commas, colons, parentheses, or regular hyphens. Keep en dashes in numeric and date ranges.
• Remove decorative emojis, mechanical bold labels, title-case headings, and inline-header bullet lists unless the target medium expects them.
• Remove "let me know", "here is", "of course", knowledge-cutoff disclaimers, and other pasted chatbot artefacts.
• Remove vague positive endings. End on the real point.

Editing Principles

• Specific beats impressive. Name the person, object, constraint, date, place, evidence, or trade-off.
• Direct beats announced. Do the thing instead of saying "let's explore" or "here's what matters".
• Context beats blanket rules. A support email, a board memo, a product page, and a personal essay need different levels of warmth and polish.
• Voice beats cleanliness. Preserve human asides, mixed feelings, unusual details, and defendable quirks.
• Evidence beats authority theatre. Replace "experts say" with the named source or remove the claim.
• Trust the reader. Cut hand-holding, moralising, and permission-giving unless the relationship calls for reassurance.

Guardrails

• Do not invent facts, quotes, names, studies, links, or statistics to make prose feel concrete.
• Do not make neutral reference, legal, medical, financial, or technical text more opinionated than the genre allows.
• Do not remove nuance that protects accuracy.
• Do not over-compress if it drops required coverage.
• Do not rewrite quoted text unless the user explicitly asks.
• Preserve code identifiers, API names, product names, regulatory terms, and exact UI labels unless the task is to rename them.

References

• references/voice-and-context.md: audience, genre, dials, and voice calibration.
• references/ai-writing-patterns.md: AI-writing tells and false-positive checks.
• references/structures-and-phrases.md: slop phrase and structure audit.
• references/preflight.md: final delivery checks and scoring.
• references/sources.md: source projects and attribution notes.