I adapted The Elements of Style to make Claude Code write in plain English

I wanted Claude to be concise without dropping content and thorough without repeating itself. The Elements of Style is a short writing guide by William Strunk Jr., published in 1920 and revised by E. B. White in 1959. Its central advice is to write directly, use concrete language, prefer active voice, and omit needless words. I made a small CC0 writing standard for user-facing responses and prose written to files. The root CLAUDE.md carries the short default; SKILL.md preserves Strunk's eighteen rules and adds fuller guidance for sustained dialogue and writing-heavy tasks. The adaptation adds agent-specific guidance: explain unfamiliar concepts before using specialised terms, avoid hype and unnecessary coined language, make every word tell, and keep Markdown easy to scan and parse. github.com/sdi2200262/elements-of-style-for-agents I've also tried this with Codex and it works like a charm. From my personal experience, skills that give general be concise instructions but no "how to" instructions give a bad result of Claude's slop-ish writing style in a concise format. These rules seem to work better for me. Would you keep this in every CLAUDE.md, or load the fuller skill only for writing-heavy work?