Documentation prose is plain, active, and free of marketing language
Documentation is read by someone who is already stuck. Promotional adjectives and hedging add reading time without adding information, and they make the honest parts harder to trust. Write sentences in the active voice and name the actor, so a reader learns who has to do the thing. The check below names only evidence a tool can count, because an auditor that scores the same files differently on two runs makes every other score in the report unreliable.
Observable check
README.md, files under docs/, the contributing guide, security policy, and code of conduct at whichever path R-COM-02, R-COM-04, and R-COM-03 accept, and the entry text under the changelog's release headings, contain no em dash (U+2014), en dash (U+2013), or emoji character; every heading is sentence case except a heading preserved from an attributed third-party code of conduct; and none of the words robust, powerful, seamless, comprehensive, blazing, or effortless describes the project.
Where this comes from
- https://github.com/evilmartians/agent-skills/blob/main/skills/good-readme/SKILL.md
- https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/how-to-make-your-open-source-popular
Last read against these sources on 2026-07-28.
Same provenance and same caveat as R-DOC-01. Upstream carries the plain-language half twice, as 'No jargon' in the skill and as 'Don't use tech speak, write like you'd speak with your colleagues in real life' in the essay. The active-voice requirement and the ban on marketing language are this standard's own. skills/oss-writing separately cites https://www.asd-ste100.org/, a controlled-language specification that would be the stronger source. Public secondary material on it was read on 2026-07-28, which confirmed the sentence, paragraph, and noun-stack figures that skill carries; the specification itself is paywalled and has never been read for this rule. ASD-STE100 also governs technical maintenance documentation rather than a README, so it would not carry this rule alone. Separately, the scored file list named CONTRIBUTING.md, SECURITY.md, and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the root until 2026-07-31, so a repository keeping them in .github/, which R-COM-02, R-COM-03, and R-COM-04 all accept, had that prose scored against nothing. The list now delegates each path to the rule that owns the file.