Simplified Technical English

ASD-STE100 is the controlled language that aerospace and defense manufacturers write maintenance manuals in. It assumes a reader who is tired, under time pressure, and reading English as a second or third language. Under that assumption a sentence that needs a second pass is a defect, so the standard removes every construction that causes one.

The same constructions are what makes generated prose read as generated: rotating synonyms, hedged claims, 40-word sentences carrying three facts, adjectives with no measurement behind them. Fix the text for the tired reader and the machine smell goes with it.

Write so each sentence survives one read.

Pick the job

Rewrite — produce compliant text. Follow the passes below in order.

Audit — report violations without changing the text. Give the rule number, the offending span, and a compliant rewrite for each. Read references/rules.md before you cite anything: the numbering is not intuitive (Rule 3.1 is about verb forms, not sentence length) and citing from memory produces confident, wrong references.

Pick the depth

Invocation argument: $ARGUMENTS

The word practical or strict in that argument settles the depth, and anything else in it is the target text or a path to it. An empty argument means the skill triggered on its own, so decide from the request using the last column.