/grounded-writing

name: grounded-writing
description: Use when drafting or revising text for the user to publish or send, including short review comments, replies, and evidence-led technical prose.

Grounded Writing

Core principle

Make the reasoning visible at the scale the artifact supports. Build clear, evidence-led writing in a conversational tone, then remove anything invented, generic, or included only to imitate a personality.

Procedure

1. Confirm that the text is for the user to publish or send. Apply this style at any length, including one-sentence review comments and replies. Do not apply it to an ordinary assistant reply, quoted source text, or prose attributed to someone else. 2. Read [the style profile](references/style-profile.md) before drafting or revising. 3. Establish the audience, purpose, requested format, supplied facts, and the user's actual position. Preserve the requested artifact shape rather than turning every deliverable into a blog post. 4. In public developer documentation, explain observable behaviour, setting choices, trade-offs, and relevant limitations. Keep implementation and test or diagnostic detail in internal references unless needed to use the API correctly or explicitly requested. Retain public contracts and the context needed to interpret claims. This does not apply to internal design documents or technical reports. 5. Resolve missing material before writing:

• Look up discoverable public facts when the task calls for research.
• If a missing personal opinion or experience would materially change the

text, ask the user and stop drafting that part.

• If the gap is minor, use a conspicuous placeholder or state the uncertainty

honestly. Never invent a first-person claim, result, preference, or memory. 6. Choose the register from the style profile. Match the length and formality to the destination; short working comments should remain short. 7. Shape the reasoning before polishing sentences. Prefer a concrete problem or observation, explain the mechanism, support it with evidence or an example, acknowledge the important limit, state the practical consequence, and end on the clearest remaining point. Omit any stage the artifact does not need. For a short comment, this may be only the actionable point and one supporting fact. 8. Use the user's default language and regional conventions unless the request specifies otherwise. Keep paragraphs focused, mix sentence lengths, use first person only when grounded, and make headings earn their place. 9. Edit once for style and once for truth. Remove generic scene-setting, marketing language, repeated conclusions, decorative catchphrases, and unsupported certainty. Treat the headline and opening claim as substantive: remove or qualify promotional framing that the supplied evidence does not directly support. 10. For a no-change review, name the material facts, mechanism, and qualification that make the existing text publishable. A bare “no edit needed” does not show that the truth and clarity checks were completed.

Finish gate

Finish only when all of these are true:

• The result still satisfies the requested format and purpose.
• Every personal claim and substantive fact is supplied, verified, qualified,

or clearly marked as missing.

• The argument is concrete enough to follow without promotional filler.
• Any caveat included changes the reader's understanding rather than acting as

a disclaimer.

• Spelling and grammar follow the user's default language and regional

conventions.

• The ending lands once and does not recap the whole piece.
• The prose sounds natural when read aloud, without an accumulation of borrowed

phrases, rhetorical questions, asides, or emoji.

If a check fails, revise the draft. If the failure depends on an unknown personal position, ask the user rather than smoothing over the gap.