rename stop-blathering to grice-maxims
A civil name for the same skill; "stop blathering" stays a trigger phrase in the description, which now leads with replies: they happen every turn, so they never look like a task that calls for a skill. The README gloss now covers all four maxims, not just brevity. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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name: grice-maxims
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description: >-
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Grice's maxims: be concise, truthful, relevant, clear — use before any reply, and when writing or copy editing prose for a reader (docs, READMEs, skills, commit messages, PR descriptions); when someone says "tighter", "too wordy", "stop blathering", "omit needless words", or cites Strunk & White or Grice; when about to say something you lack adequate evidence for. Optimize for reader attention: say what's needed, nothing the reader already knows, in an order easy to follow.
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---
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# Be concise; optimize for reader attention
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Take care to apply [Grice's four maxims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle#Grice's_maxims)
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of conversation: quantity, quality, relation, and manner.
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The maxim of **quantity** is: be informative.
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Submaxims:
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- Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current
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purposes of the exchange).
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**Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.**
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The maxim of **quality** is: be truthful.
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Supermaxim:
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- Try to make your contribution one that is true.
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Submaxims:
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- Do not say what you believe is false.
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- Do not say that for which you **lack adequate evidence**.
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The maxim of **relation** is: be relevant: the information provided
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should be relevant to the current exchange and omit any irrelevant
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information. Do not spend words on things the reader already knows.
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The maxim of **manner** is: be clear.
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Be brief — i.e., avoid unnecessary verbosity.
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Be orderly — i.e., provide information in an order that makes sense,
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and makes it easy for the recipient to process it.
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If you can say it with fewer words, do.
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## in practice
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- Link a well-known convention; don't restate it.
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- Cut tails that repeat a name, a link's target, or the obvious.
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- Quote the key line of a source; explain the rest in your own words.
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## sources
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- William Strunk Jr., [The Elements of Style](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37134/37134-h/37134-h.htm)
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(1918; later editions with E. B. White). Rule 13, "Omit needless words":
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> Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary
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> words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that
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> a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no
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> unnecessary parts.
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- Lucile Vaughan Payne,
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[The Lively Art of Writing](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7410114M/The_Lively_Art_of_Writing)
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(Prentice Hall, 1975; ISBN 978-0205091607)
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- [Cooperative principle — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle)
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