GitHub - obra/the-elements-of-style: William Strunk Jr.'s Elements of Style (1918) in markdown format for AI agents

William Strunk Jr.'s The Elements of Style (1918), packaged as a plugin for coding agents.

Purpose

This plugin hands your agent Strunk's guidance whenever it writes documentation, commit messages, error text, or any other prose a human will read.

What's Inside

• Skill: writing-clearly-and-concisely — when and how to apply Strunk's rules
• Reference: the complete 1918 text, roughly 12,000 tokens

The reference covers:

1. Elementary Rules of Usage — seven rules of grammar and punctuation
2. Elementary Principles of Composition — eleven rules for clear, forceful writing
3. Words and Expressions Commonly Misused — an alphabetical guide to usage pitfalls

Usage

Your agent invokes writing-clearly-and-concisely when it writes prose. The skill lists every rule at a glance, warns that the reference costs about 12,000 tokens, and suggests handing a draft to a subagent when context runs short. It opens the full reference only while writing or editing.

Installing

Every supported harness reads the skill from skills/; the per-harness manifests differ only in where they point.

Development

everyharness generates every harness manifest, bootstrap hook, and install doc from one file: everyharness.yaml. Edit that file and the skill, then regenerate:

npx everyharness generate

Never edit a generated file by hand — everyharness validate fails on drift, and the next generate overwrites your change. Generated files carry a GENERATED by everyharness header, and .everyharness/manifest.json lists them all.

Source

The text is public domain. The 1918 edition came from Project Gutenberg, converted to markdown.

• Original source: Project Gutenberg #37134
• Author: William Strunk Jr.
• Publication: 1918
• License: Public Domain