concise-writing

Writes new text, or edits existing text, so it is only as long as it needs to be and reads as human-written. Catches two failures at once: prose that is longer than its job requires, and prose that carries the tells of machine generation. The first is fixed by cutting whole units before trimming words; the second by rewriting the tells, not just striking them. The guardrail against both is the reader: a cut that costs meaning is a bad cut.

The cut ladder, the question set, the compressed catalog of AI tells, the brevity moves, and the over-trimming guardrail all live in references/concise-writing.md. Load that file before working and follow it. The "what not to cut" section matters as much as the rest: this skill is not a shrink ray.

When to use

The user wants text written tight from the start, or an existing draft made shorter and less machine-sounding: emails, posts, docs, announcements, READMEs, marketing copy, essays. Reach for it on "tighten this", "make it shorter", "cut the fluff", "this reads like AI", or "write a concise X".

If the problem is not length or voice but the order of an argument (the answer should come first, the logic should be a pyramid), prefer scqa-pyramid to structure it, then use this skill to tighten the result.

Language

Work in the language the user is writing in. The reference file is English; keep the framework and the tell-words keyed to it, but apply the spirit to the target language (every language has its own filler, its own throat-clearing, its own machine cadence).

Inputs