writing-simple-and-directlisted

# Writing Simple and Direct House style for prose. Three goals: clearer communication for humans, fewer tokens per artifact, and removal of machine-prose defaults from our output. This SKILL.md is the entry point; expansions, examples, and the review protocol live in sidecar files loaded on demand. Scope, stated once: document schemas (TCS, CONOP-FORMAT, OPORD-FORMAT) define **what** a document contains. This skill defines **how** the words go. Never cut a required section to save tokens. A chart that could be a table or a sentence is not this skill's tokens to cut; that finding is the figure skill's pre-question (designing-clear-data-displays). **Philosophy**: *Have a point. Make it in the fewest words that keep it true.* ## When to Use - Writing any prose artifact: SITREP, review, proposal, ADR, session doc, backbrief, commit message, PR text - Reviewing prose artifacts (code-reviewer loads `REVIEWING.md` for document reviews) - Writing docstrings and comments (apply the rules; enforcement stays on artifacts) - Adopting this skill in a downstream repo (`ADOPTION.md`, once) ## The Kernel Eight rules. The ambient copy lives in CLAUDE.md (see `ADOPTION.md`); `RULES.md` expands each one with its test. 1. Have a point; state it in the first sentence. No throat-clearing. 2. Prefer the concrete word: name the file, the number, the failure. 3. One idea per sentence. Link sentences; do not pack them. 4. Active voice unless the actor is unknown or irrelevant. 5. Cut cruft wor