clear-writinglisted

# Clear Writing Two jobs, one skill. **Write clearly.** Text that a tired reader, often not a native English speaker, cannot misread on the first pass. The rules come from ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, the controlled language aerospace manufacturers use for maintenance manuals. **Remove the machine.** Text that does not read as LLM output. Not because AI writing is forbidden, but because the patterns are vague, padded, and unfalsifiable. Cutting them makes writing better whoever produced it. These two jobs mostly agree. Both hate filler, hedging, inflated verbs, and vague claims. They disagree about exactly one thing, and Step 1 exists to settle it. ## Step 1: Classify The Register Do this before anything else. It decides which ruleset governs. | | **Instructional** | **Voiced prose** | |---|---|---| | Reader is | executing something | being informed or persuaded | | Examples | docs, setup guides, runbooks, error messages, CLI output, API reference, parameter docs, UI copy, troubleshooting steps, agent instructions and prompts, incident reports, commit bodies, support macros | README opening and "why I made it", blog posts, social posts, announcements, release note narrative, essays, personal writing | | Governed by | `references/ste-rules.md` | `references/ai-patterns.md` | | Rhythm | Uniform. Predictable is correct. | Varied. Uniform is the tell. | One document holds both. A README's opening paragraph is voiced prose. Its install steps are instructional.