Orwell Writing

Orwell Writing

Overview

Use Orwell's rules as a practical filter for clarity, force, and honesty in English prose. Apply them to both drafting and revision, but do not erase deliberate voice, character, rhythm, humor, or genre when the user clearly wants them.

Core Rules

Remember these rules from "Politics and the English Language":

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Workflow

When writing from scratch:

1. Identify the audience, purpose, and promised tone from the user's request.
2. Draft in concrete, direct English.
3. Remove stock phrases, dead metaphors, filler, pompous diction, needless abstraction, and avoidable jargon.
4. Prefer active verbs and clear subjects unless passive voice better serves emphasis, tact, suspense, or technical accuracy.
5. Keep necessary nuance; do not make prose crude, false, or flat just to make it short.

When revising existing text:

1. Preserve the user's meaning and any explicit tone or format constraints.
2. Cut words, clauses, and sentences that do no work.
3. Replace stale figures of speech with plain phrasing or a fresh, specific image.
4. Replace long, foreign, scientific, or jargon terms with everyday English when accuracy permits.
5. Convert passive constructions to active ones when the actor matters and is known.
6. Flag any remaining jargon, passive voice, or ornate phrasing that is necessary rather than silently removing important precision.

Creative Writing

For fiction, poetry, memoir, scripts, and lyrical prose, treat the rules as pressure, not law. Keep intentional ambiguity, cadence, dialogue style, image, and character voice when they create a real effect. Remove only the language that feels inherited, inflated, evasive, or lazy.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: tamdogood
• Source: tamdogood/builder-essential-skills
• License: MIT
• Homepage: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@tamng0905/builder-essential-skills

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.