Writing Craft

Positive principles from the centuries-old writing-craft tradition, as an operating guide for an AI agent drafting, editing or reviewing prose on a writer's behalf. The skill is the operational shorthand; the books on the recommended-reading list are where the depth lives.

Binding rules

For any agent working on someone's prose. Rules 1 to 7 and 9 are principles from references/principles.md, named as there; rule 8 condenses its section on voice across registers, and rule 10 the writing outcome review.

1. Make every edit earn its place. Name the problem a change solves; if it does not improve truth, clarity, structure, register or rhythm, keep the original.
2. Preserve the source's causal mechanism. Keep who acted, what changed and why; a smoother generalization is less accurate even when it sounds polished.
3. Preserve decisive detail. Keep the names, quantities, constraints, sequence and exceptions that make a claim true; compression removes repetition, not evidence.
4. Protect meaningful voice variation during editing. Keep deliberate fragments, changes of pace and characteristic diction unless a specific defect requires intervention.
5. Cut every word that does not earn its place. The oldest rule in the craft; adverbs and adjectives propping up weak words go first.
6. Specificity beats abstraction. A specific example beats a general claim; it is the closest thing to a craft principle that always works.
7. Keep structure in proportion to the material. Never force a fixed number of sections, bullets, examples or takeaways onto material shaped otherwise.
8. Write in the register of where the piece will appear (article, social post, email, speech) and test it by reading aloud. Article voice in a social post reads as AI-generated even when a human wrote it.
9. Trust the reader. Most writing problems improve when the writer trusts the reader more.
10. In autonomous review, reject only for a stated requirement violation or concrete reader harm, with exact evidence, and label taste separately. A reviewer who polishes away sound prose has failed.