technical-writing skill (riekelt) for Claude Code: a house style for technical documents

• States kind, audience, purpose and non-goals before any draft

  Before a new document or a large section, Claude writes down the document kind, who reads it, the verb the reader must do and what the document will not cover. It asks you only when an unknown would change the audience or scope.

  Read · Checkpoint before drafting

• Reads up to two similar documents and the folder's README index

  Claude reads comparable documents in the same folder, adopts their structure and tone, checks for a README that indexes the folder, and checks whether the topic already has a home. It adds the new document to the index when one exists.

  Files · Read first, then write

• Five kinds, each with its own edit rule

  Normative, descriptive, historical, runbook and reference documents are edited differently. A contract that code violates is not watered down, a changelog is never rewritten, and a runbook step must have been run.

  Read · Classify the document

• Seven rules that apply in every document

  No em dashes, en dashes or double hyphens. No changelog section or last-updated field inside a document. No delivery history in prose. No claim without a traceable source. One fact in one home. Accepted decisions stay unchanged. Headings in sentence case.

  Write · Hard rules

• Six steps from read-first to a verified draft

  Read first, declare the checkpoint, draft conclusion first, ground every claim with a confidence label, run a style pass, then verify with the reviewing-technical-prose checklist.

  Write · Workflow

• Sentence rules, word choice, headings, banned constructions, formatting

  A style file with five sections. It carries the banned-constructions list that catches machine-sounding text and two self-checks: read it aloud, and delete the product name to see if the text still makes sense.

  Read · references/style.md

• Grounding, confidence labels, reviewed documents, staleness

  A truth file with six sections: grounding claims, confidence labels, fact versus proposal versus hypothesis, reviewed documents, keeping documents true, and rules about rules.

  Read · references/truth.md

• Sends each document type to one of the sibling skills

  A table of 11 task types, such as postmortem, changelog or API reference, with the sibling skill to load on top of this one.

  Read · Routing table

Watch out for

• It edits documents in your repo

  The skill drafts and revises documents and updates a README index. Review the diff before you commit. github.com

• The plugin route adds 2 agents and 2 commands

  The plugin ships agents prose-reviewer and doc-grounder (both with Read, Glob, Grep and Bash tools) and the commands /prose-review and /ground-docs. The plugin folder has no hooks or MCP config. Use the skills command in the install box if you want only this skill. github.com