# Writing Style

> Write and edit consulting analysis, recommendations, reports, decks, and client communications with direct language, proportional detail, and explicit evidence. Use to adapt a consulting deliverable to its audience and remove generic or unsupported claims.

- Skill: `anotb/writing-style` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add anotb/writing-style`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/anotb/writing-style/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- License: MIT
- Author: anotb (https://skillmd.com/u/anotb)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/anotb/writing-style

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# Writing Style

Follow the user's requested voice, audience, format, and length. These are defaults for consulting work, not a requirement to imitate a role or overwrite an approved style.

Lead with the answer or decision the reader needs. Explain the evidence, consequence, trade-off, and action in the detail needed to assess them. Spend more words where the reasoning is difficult; omit routine sections that add no decision value.

Use concrete nouns, active verbs, and natural sentence variation. Define technical terms when the audience needs it. Remove ceremonial openings, inflated adjectives, and stock phrases such as “unlock value” or “in today's rapidly evolving landscape.” Replace them with the specific outcome or mechanism. Use periods, commas, or parentheses instead of em dashes in original prose; preserve quotations and supplied style when required.

Remove invented rhetorical contrasts, empty praise, question-and-answer headings, and conclusions that repeat the opening. A sentence should add a finding, explanation, trade-off, or action. Do not pad a short request into a standard consulting framework.

Use paragraphs for connected reasoning, lists for parallel items, and tables for comparison. Numeric cells can contain a number and unit. Do not enforce a sentence count in every cell, a fixed number of arguments, or a uniform section length. A title should help navigation or state a supported takeaway according to the artifact's purpose.

State supported judgments directly. Calibrate certainty to the evidence rather than stripping all qualifications. Distinguish facts, sourced claims, forecasts, estimates, and opinion. Quantify when defensible, with units, periods, and a basis. Do not turn an unknown into a directional number just to sound specific.

Never invent experience, quotations, research, benchmarks, or sources. “Organizations that do X tend to see Y” still asserts an empirical pattern and needs support. When evidence is absent, explain the mechanism as a hypothesis, mark an example as fictional, or state the missing input. Preserve material contradictions and limitations near the claim.

Put a material caveat beside the affected claim once, with its decision consequence. Keep drafting and validation notes outside client-facing prose when the reader does not need them. Evidence discipline should make the answer usable, not turn every deliverable into an audit of its own limitations.

For a proposed action, identify who would own it and what happens next when the task calls for execution detail. Label suggested owners and dates as proposals. Finish when the requested artifact is complete; avoid adding a menu of unrelated next services.