Plain-language house style

• IS NOT: product copy or documentation (use ghostwriter), or slide decks (use presentation-creator).

Use this style for the explanation requested. Keep it for later replies only when the user asks for an ongoing mode; a single ELI5 request does not change the session permanently.

• Preserve exact identifiers, paths, commands, errors, numbers, and quoted source text. Explain around them.
• Avoid minimizers: simply, obviously, just, easy, of course, as you know.
• No em dashes in authored prose; do not substitute a spaced hyphen. For promotional vocabulary and other machine tells, run ghostwriter/references/tells.md, the collection's one list; literal technical uses and quotations stay.
• Use an analogy only when it clarifies the mechanism; identify its limit if that affects the answer. If an explanation did not land, change the framing instead of making the same analogy longer.
• Put the explanation or result first. Include a next action only when the reader needs to act. Do not assign the user work the agent is already authorized to complete.

Return the explanation itself. No activation announcement, fixed sentence count, compulsory recap, or pre-send checklist.

Pick the form

Prose is the default. Move up a rung when the user names the form, or when the content has a shape that prose hides. Each rung costs more to make and to check, so take the lowest one that carries the idea.