clarity

Clarity

Clear writing is a matter of understanding what your reader needs, and giving it to them in a way that they can understand.

clarity is also an Agent Skill that applies the rules below when you draft, rewrite, or review prose with a coding agent. To install it:

NPM

npx skills add addyosmani/clarity

pnpm

pnpm dlx skills add addyosmani/clarity

Then pick a mode:

/clarity rewrite draft.md     it edits a draft you already have
/clarity review draft.md      it critiques and leaves your file alone
/clarity interview <topic>    it interviews you, then co-writes from what you said

Full walkthrough below. samples/ has two essays before and after a pass, plus one built from an interview with its transcript.

The site has a fuller explanation of the approach, worked example, and evaluation protocol. It also has step-by-step tutorials for review, rewrite, and interview mode in Claude Code and Codex.

Prefer working in the browser? The Clarity Writing Editor reviews AI writing tells, readability, and the broader Clarity questions without uploading your draft.

On writing that earns its reader

A reader gives you their attention one sentence at a time. They take it back the moment a sentence stops paying.

Structure, grammar, word choice, and rhythm all serve it.

Most advice about writing is advice about how to stop wasting that attention. Cut the adverb. Use the short word. Name the actor. All of it is right, and all of it starts one step too late. The fastest way to waste a reader's attention is to write something correct that they did not need.

So the first work is not on the page. It is deciding who you are writing for, what they already carry, and what they should be holding when they finish.

Good writing is useful, clear, and yours.

What follows is what I have found to hold, and where I think the usual advice needs adjusting.

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Useful

1. Write for one person you can picture

A piece written by you, to a specific audience: a specific set of people, at a specific point in their lives, in a specific set of roles. It might be the engineer who's been writing software for three years and now wonders if they're keeping up well enough with AI. It might be you, back when you thought that you'd never write well enough for others to take your words seriously.

This is not hypothetical: you are, right now, writing. So consider that you are making some decisions. What's the best way to explain this stuff? What words should I use? Where should I start? Does this joke land? All these decisions become softer when you write to everyone. You know that you'll be helping someone at one end of the bell curve who needs clarity while frustrating someone at the other end who knows all that stuff already and is missing something subtler. But writing with deliberate direction helps you, and it helps your reader, see which part you need to land on.

Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.

— Strunk & White, The Elements of Style

2. Know what they bring, and what they need from you

Underlying both decisions and clarity is this: the reader has something in their head as they sit down to read. Some of it's correct, some of it's stale and outdated and needs replacing, and some of it's a misconception that you're writing to correct.

Throughout a single piece of writing you'll face two different questions: What context does the reader already have? and, crucially, What context does the reader need? The gap between those two answers defines the piece. That is to say, this is the main point where writers of technical material fail in their first draft: they go straight from the question they want to answer to the answer that they want to give, completely bypassing the reader-side question of what the reader actually knows already.

3. Decide what they take away

Your piece must center around a single thing. That thing should be stated in a sentence, ideally somewhere close to the beginning. (No, even now, you feel an internal twitch that says "I should start with the bigger picture before getting down to specifics," but just stick with it.) It should be stated in a way that someone could reasonably argue with.

That is to say, the difference is between subject and claim. A subject lets you talk about the subject as fully as you can, but risks slowly drifting away from your topic. A claim invites you to argue; it demands that you persuade.

Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before. Not two thoughts, or five, just one.

— William Zinsser, On Writing Well

4. Say something only you could say

Doesn't this apply to everyone? A check you can do on each paragraph is: could this paragraph (nearly) word for word appear in someone else's article on the same subject? If something passes this test, then it's filler, even if it's well made.

What tends to survive the test is your stuff: specific observed details, measured numbers, incidents of which you were a party, lived arguments, changed beliefs.

This is the stuff that can't be borrowed. If your piece isn't full of it, then it's sourceless. It's why writing exists at all. A draft that lacks it has a sourcing problem, not a prose problem.

5. Make every sentence pay

Now, try this: each sentence should leave the reader with more than the prior one. Don't repeat the same point in different words. Don't throat-clear.

Most padding is caused not by not having enough to say, but by choosing to make a piece longer than is needed to make your point. The other source is writing that follows someone else's form expectations, such as writing an introduction that introduces nothing and writing a conclusion that concludes nothing.

So cut both causes of padding and move that beautiful, short piece in front of your reader. A short piece that lands beats a long piece that covers.

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Clear

6. Be specific enough to be wrong

Vague writing can't be verified, so it can't be trusted.

Try to be as specific as you can. Take a sentence like "a dependency that made us vulnerable." It has the grammar of a specific and the content of an abstraction, and it tells the reader nothing that "supply chain risk is real" did not already tell them. The obvious course of action is to name the package, to name the month, and to say how you caught it. When a writer fails to do so, they have written the abstraction with more words.

Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.

— Strunk & White, The Elements of Style

If you can't think of a verifiable example, then delete it rather than blurring it. If you can't think of a sensible example, then don't invent one, because when you fabricate a detail, you destroy any residual trust.

7. Put someone in the sentence

Give people agency. Decisions, cultures, and data don't act; people do.

Sentences like "bad things tend to happen in March" have no human actor. Find a more concrete subject. Try: "Most people find March a difficult month for things to go according to plan." Now you can see who is doing the action.

Use the second-person "you" when no specific person fits. It makes you engage the reader directly.

8. Use the plain word, and break the long sentence

Prefer shorter words and sentences rather than longer ones. Short words and single-idea sentences read more easily than long words and sentences that express more than one idea.

A simple style is the result of thorough thinking. Ornate prose often indicates that the writer still doesn't have a clear picture of what they are trying to say.

Simple writing is persuasive. A good arg