hugobowne Writing Revision
Use this skill to improve any kind of writing while preserving the writer's intent, factual claims, audience fit, and useful voice.
Workflow
- Read
references/writing.md. - For technical writing, docs, changelogs, UI copy, onboarding text, help text, or product explanations, extend the base workflow with
references/technical-writing.md. - Identify the writing situation before editing:
- format
- audience
- goal
- desired tone
- constraints or facts that must stay fixed
- Rewrite in passes:
- purpose and reader fit
- structure and flow
- paragraph shape
- sentence clarity
- voice, tone, and rhythm
- final polish
- Preserve facts, names, dates, quotes, commitments, technical terms, legal meaning, and personal details unless the user explicitly asks to change them.
- For technical writing, apply the technical extension after the base writing pass: technical precision, executable examples, exact UI labels, identifiers, and product truth take priority over smoothness.
Revision Rules
- Make the main point easy to find.
- Match the structure to the reader's job and the piece's purpose.
- Keep one dominant idea per paragraph or section.
- Prefer concrete language over vague abstraction.
- Improve rhythm without making the writing sound generic.
- Preserve the writer's voice when revising existing text.
- Cut filler and repeated ideas.
- Avoid em dashes. Use space-padded hyphens (
-), colons, semicolons, commas, or sentence breaks when they fit better. - Remove cliches, stock idioms, and familiar figures of speech unless the user explicitly wants that register.
- Add transitions only when they clarify the relationship between ideas.
- Do not make claims stronger than the source supports.
- Do not over-polish personal, emotional, or opinionated writing until it loses its human texture.
- Do not rewrite technical detail into vagueness or change commands, paths, labels, version numbers, routes, or identifiers unless they are wrong.