dckcandClaude Opus 5.5
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From the "be concise" section of ~/.codex/AGENTS.md (Grice's maxims), citing Strunk's Elements of Style and Payne's Lively Art of Writing. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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name, description
| name | description |
|---|---|
| stop-blathering | Stop blathering; be concise, truthful, relevant, clear (Grice's maxims) — use when writing or copy editing prose for a reader (docs, READMEs, skills, commit messages, PR descriptions, replies); when someone says "tighter", "too wordy", "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. |
Be concise; optimize for reader attention
Take care to apply Grice's four maxims of conversation: quantity, quality, relation, and manner.
The maxim of quantity is: be informative.
Submaxims:
- Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
The maxim of quality is: be truthful.
Supermaxim:
- Try to make your contribution one that is true.
Submaxims:
- Do not say what you believe is false.
- Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
The maxim of relation is: be relevant: the information provided should be relevant to the current exchange and omit any irrelevant information. Do not spend words on things the reader already knows.
The maxim of manner is: be clear.
Be brief — i.e., avoid unnecessary verbosity. Be orderly — i.e., provide information in an order that makes sense, and makes it easy for the recipient to process it.
If you can say it with fewer words, do.
in practice
- Link a well-known convention; don't restate it.
- Cut tails that repeat a name, a link's target, or the obvious.
- Quote the key line of a source; explain the rest in your own words.
sources
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William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style (1918; later editions with E. B. White). Rule 13, "Omit needless words":
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
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Lucile Vaughan Payne, The Lively Art of Writing (Prentice Hall, 1975; ISBN 978-0205091607)