The Elements of Style
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:
- Elementary Rules of Usage — seven rules of grammar and punctuation
- Elementary Principles of Composition — eleven rules for clear, forceful writing
- 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
| Harness | Install |
|---|---|
| Claude Code | see docs/install/claude-code.md |
| Cursor | see docs/install/cursor.md |
| Codex | see docs/install/codex.md |
| Devin CLI | see docs/install/devin.md |
| Kimi Code | see docs/install/kimi.md |
| Gemini CLI | see docs/install/gemini.md |
| OpenCode | see docs/install/opencode.md |
| Pi | see docs/install/pi.md |
| Hermes Agent | see docs/install/hermes.md |
| Agent Plugins 1.0 clients | see docs/install/agent-plugins-1.0.md |
| Factory Droid / Grok / Copilot (marketplace descriptor) | see docs/install/agents-marketplace.md |
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