Writing Style

A review pass over prose you just wrote, done as a last step before presenting it as finished. Prose posted through a CLI like gh (PR and issue titles, bodies, comments) gets this as its only check, since that path has no normal edit-and-review flow of its own. Applies to HTML output as well as Markdown.

1. Remove em dashes

The em dash character is not allowed anywhere in the output. Replace each one with whichever fits the sentence best:

• A period, splitting the sentence in two.
• A comma, if the clauses are short and closely related.
• A colon, if what follows explains or lists what came before.
• Parentheses, for a true aside.
• A connecting word such as "and," "but," "so," or "because," if that reads more naturally.

Prefer one of the options above to a hyphen or semicolon swap, picking whichever keeps the sentence clearest.

2. Shorten long sentences

Flag any sentence that's hard to follow in one read, especially ones with several comma-separated clauses or that run past roughly 25-30 words. Rewrite by: