STE + Humanizer: Write Like an Aerospace Manual, Not Like a Chatbot

This skill merges two approaches to the same problem — text that reads as machine-generated.

Simplified Technical English (ASD-STE100) is the controlled language aerospace and defense manufacturers use for maintenance documentation. Its rules exist so a tired reader who is not a native English speaker cannot misread an instruction: short sentences, one meaning per word, active voice, approved modals, condition before command.

The content-pattern catalog (originally the humanizer skill) targets the specific tells of LLM-generated prose: inflated significance, promotional language, vague attributions, rule-of-three padding, em-dash overuse, sycophantic tone, and more — cataloged from Wikipedia's "Signs of AI writing" project.

Both remove the same broad family of problems (long sentences, synonym rotation, hedges, filler, decorative clauses), so they combine cleanly almost everywhere. Where they genuinely disagree, STE's structural rules win, and only within STE's own declared scope. See Precedence below.

Precedence

STE's own Limits section (near the end of this file) states it applies to technical facts and instructions, not to marketing copy, blog voice, or brand writing, because it deletes persuasion by design. That line is the exact boundary this merge uses:

• Inside STE's scope (technical/procedural/descriptive text — docs, runbooks, error messages, reports, agent instructions): if a content-pattern fix would violate a structural rule, the structural rule wins. Concretely: no contractions even if it reads warmer without STE (Rule 4.2), no first-person opinion injection, no deliberately varied "punchy then meandering" rhythm past the word ceiling, no banned modals for hedging (Section on modals below), no digressions or "let some mess in" (Rule 4.1, one topic per paragraph). The content-pattern catalog's diagnostic value — this phrase is filler, this claim is vague, this is a formulaic frame — still applies; only the "add first-person soul" remedy is out of scope here.
• Outside STE's scope (blog posts, marketing, essays, narrative, brand voice — anything STE itself disclaims): the content-pattern catalog applies in full, including the voice-injection guidance in references/voice-mode.md. Nothing here overrides that, because STE was never claiming that territory.

If you are unsure which side a passage falls on, classify it the way Step 1 below does: procedural or descriptive means STE governs; if it's neither (it's persuasive, personal, or literary), it's Voice mode.