Editing, Style, and Voice

Apply ../00-blog-writing-guardrails/SKILL.md first; its gates apply to every post before this skill's guidance.

1. Plain-language self-edit gate

• Apply the plain-language and clarity gate in the guardrails skill as a self-edit pass on the draft before publishing. [DIGITALGOV-PLAIN-01]

2. Cutting filler, hedging, and wordiness gate

• Interrogate every word in a sentence and remove or replace any word that does not contribute meaning; concise writing does not always have the fewest words, but it always uses the strongest ones. [PURDUEOWL-CONCISE-01]
• Cut hedging qualifiers ("somewhat," "fairly," "it seems," "in some cases") and redundant phrases that repeat an idea already stated, rather than leaving them in for a softer tone. [PURDUEOWL-CONCISE-01]
• Convert a phrase or clause into a single word or shorter phrase wherever the meaning survives intact, and watch for nominalizations (verbs turned into nouns, such as "make a decision" for "decide") that force extra helper verbs and lengthen the sentence without adding value. [PURDUEOWL-CONCISE-01]
• Combine sentences when one fact does not need a full sentence of its own and can be folded into an adjacent sentence without losing its value. [PURDUEOWL-CONCISE-01]

3. Active-voice preference gate

• Default to active voice, where the sentence's subject performs the action, for the majority of a post's sentences; active voice keeps meaning clear and sentences from becoming complicated or wordy. [PURDUEOWL-ACTIVEVOICE-01]
• Reserve passive voice for cases where the agent performing the action is genuinely obvious, unimportant, or unknown, or where the writer deliberately wants to foreground the action or the thing acted upon; do not default to passive voice as a stylistic habit. [PURDUEOWL-ACTIVEVOICE-01]