technical-writing SKILL.md skillA
technical-writing from roasbeef/loom is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add roasbeef/loom/technical-writing@git:20260828.d16dbe8Pins git:20260828.d16dbe8 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- roasbeef/loom
- Path
.claude/skills/technical-writing/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 1
- Latest version
- git:20260828.d16dbe8, committed Aug 28, 2026
- Size
- 10,866 bytes
- Repository stars
- 11
- License
- MIT
Clear-writing guide distilled from Steven Pinker's "The Sense of Style." Use when writing or revising prose that must be clear to a reader — documentation, design docs, specs, explanations, essays, emails, reports, RFCs, release notes — or when asked to make writing clearer, tighter, less academic, or less jargon-laden. Activate for "make this clearer", "tighten this", "why is this hard to read", "edit this for clarity", or any prose-quality pass.
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Technical Writing (The Sense of Style) A practical guide to clear prose, distilled from Steven Pinker's *The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century* (2014). The whole book reduces to one image and one cause, with four sets of consequences. Use this when **drafting** prose (write it right the first time) or **revising** prose (run the revision pass at the bottom). ## Required first step: read every reference file This file is only the map. The substance of the skill — the decision rules, the tables, and the worked before/after rewrites you will actually apply — lives in the reference files. **Before drafting or revising a single sentence, Read all six**, in one batch of parallel Read calls: 1. `references/classic-style.md` — the window metaphor in full; the taxonomy of styles and when classic style may be broken 2. `references/curse-of-knowledge.md` — the blind-spot mechanics; the external debugging methods 3. `references/coherence.md` — the coherence-relation table, connectives, and rewrites 4. `references/syntax.md` — garden paths, end-weight, center-embedding, with examples …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add roasbeef/loom/technical-writing@sha256:45563df5062ad2baThe line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260828.d16dbe8, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_uiic7ntefndoogsk)
2 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 1 version of this file, committed on Aug 28, 2026.
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (10866 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
roasbeef/loom · 11 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-10-20 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_uiic7ntefndoogsk GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=roasbeef/loom/technical-writing GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/45563df5062ad2ba80a50907ef3d59f8c24e9a4aeea5289b008b8f2c75342c49
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.