The Elements of Style was a textbook I had to study. I liked it because it was concise. Only much later did I discover the book was famous.
What a skill is
Claude Code lets you store custom instructions as markdown files in .claude/skills/. You invoke them with a slash command — /skill-name — and Claude follows the instructions in the file as its task.
A skill for prose review is a natural fit. The instructions are a checklist: read the file, check each rule, quote every violation, suggest a fix.
What it checks
The skill encodes all eighteen Strunk and White rules.
Usage rules — possessive singular, series commas, parenthetic expressions, comma splices, broken sentences, dangling participles.
Composition rules — one topic per paragraph, begin with a topic sentence, active voice, positive statements, omit needless words, avoid loose sentence chains, parallel construction, keep related words together, consistent tense in summaries, emphatic words at the end.
Misused words — the full list from the book: very, however at the start of a sentence, due to used adverbially, less for fewer, while for although, literally as intensifier, and about forty others.
For each violation it quotes the original, names the rule, and suggests a corrected version. At the end, an overall verdict on the dominant weaknesses.
How to use it
Invoke it with the path to any post:
/prose _posts/2026-03-03-a-strunk-and-white-skill-for-claude-code.md
The output is a list of violations with suggested rewrites. Take the ones that improve the sentence; leave the ones that would flatten your voice. Strunk and White are guides, not grammar police.
Getting it
The skill is available as a GitHub Gist. Copy the file into your own project’s .claude/skills/prose/ directory and it works immediately.
Claude Code skills follow the Agent Skills open standard, so the file should work in other tools that support the standard too. I also built a Logseq skill for managing notes and tasks from the terminal.