oss-writing: Tell catalog

Note

This page is the instruction text an agent loads, reproduced verbatim from skills/oss-writing/references/tells.md. You do not have to read it: install the kit and ask your agent for the skill by name.

The lexicon that marks prose as machine-written. Each row names a pattern and what to write instead. The composition rules and the check list in SKILL.md handle the common case. This file is the lookup for a specific suspicion, so read the row that matches rather than running the whole table over every draft.

Tell	Write instead
Significance inflation: pivotal, testament to, underscores, marks a shift, and key or critical used as importance adjectives (a key improvement). The nouns are fine: cache key, API key, critical section	State the fact and stop
Tacked-on -ing clauses: ensuring reliability, enabling faster builds, allowing users to	Split into a sentence, or cut
Nominalized gerund chains: improving the handling of the processing of	Name the action once, with a finite verb: the loader now retries
Promotional adjectives: robust, powerful, seamless, elegant, comprehensive, rich	Name the property: retries 3x, no config file
Vague attribution: best practices suggest, it is widely believed, studies show	Name the source, or drop the claim. Never invent one
Copula avoidance: vague serves as, acts as, boasts, or features	is, has, or a precise verb
AI vocabulary, and any rare word where a common one is exact: leverage, utilize, delve, streamline, facilitate, holistic, obviate, predicated on, additionally, furthermore, make use of, functionality	use, and, or nothing. Name the feature rather than calling it functionality. Reserve a rare word for where it is more precise, never for where it is more impressive
Intensifiers and minimizers: very, simply, just, easily, of course	Delete. simply and just tell a stuck reader the thing they cannot do is easy, and very is a number the writer did not look up
Empty contrast: not just X, but Y; X rather than Y where Y was invented for the sentence (instead of returning a deck nobody asked for). Tailing negation: no guessing, no wasted motion	State the positive claim and stop. Keep a contrast only when the alternative is real: a prior behavior, a live endpoint, a default the reader would hit
Manufactured list length	List what actually exists
Elegant variation: calling one thing the handler, then the callback, then the routine	One name per concept, every time, across the whole document. Match the identifier in the code and the string in the UI
False ranges: from linting to deployment	Name the two things
Passive or subjectless: was refactored, no config needed	Name the actor: the loader now caches, you do not need a config file
Filler: in order to, due to the fact that, has the ability to, it is important to note that, in the event that, at this point in time, it's worth noting that, please note, a number of	to, because, can, if, now, a count, delete
Generic closer, upbeat (this improves maintainability going forward) or defensive (and that is the finding rather than a gap to paper over)	Delete it
Signposting: let's dive in, here's what you need to know, this PR aims to, in this change, we	Start with the content
Fragmented header: a heading followed by a line restating the heading	Delete the restatement
Aphorism formulas: X is the Y of Z, X becomes a trap	The concrete claim underneath
Authority tropes: the real question is, at its core, fundamentally	Just make the point
Manufactured drama: a run of short declarative fragments	One sentence, ordinary length
Mechanical hyphenation	Follow the repository’s dictionary and style guide; hyphenate compound modifiers only where grammar or clarity requires it
Diff-anchored docs: this function was added to replace the old loop	Docs describe what is, not what changed. Commits, changelogs, and migration guides are the exception: there, describing the change is the job