Syntax Style Skill

Syntax Style

A [Claude](https://claude.ai/code) skill for sentence-level prose craft, distilled from Virginia Tufte's *Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style* (Graphics Press, 2006).

The book's thesis is its title: the arrangement of words is not decoration on top of meaning, it is part of the meaning. A sentence's shape does work. This skill turns that idea into a small set of moves Claude can reach for on demand, plus a kill-list of the patterns that make prose read flat or machine-generated.

It is not a grammar checker and not a voice generator. It assumes the content and the voice are decided, and shapes how the words are arranged.

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What it does

When you ask Claude to write, tighten, or fix the rhythm of prose, this skill gives it:

• One model for how artful sentences are built (a base clause plus free modifiers).
• 14 named moves, each matched to the rhetorical job it does best.
• A kill-list of flat and AI-sounding patterns, each paired with the structural fix.
• A revision routine: sentence level, then the seams between sentences, then a slop scan.

It works at two levels: the single sentence, and the flow between sentences in a paragraph.

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The one model

Most artful sentences are a **base clause** plus **free modifiers** attached at the front, the middle, or the end. The same model produces a two-word sentence and a sixty-word one.

base clause:            The engine failed.
+ end modifiers (right): The engine failed, a dull cough and then silence, the boat drifting toward the rocks.
+ front modifier (left): Two miles from shore, the engine failed.

Right-branching, where modifiers accumulate after a complete base clause, is the workhorse and the book's signature move. The artful version of a flat passage is often *longer*, not shorter. Two failure modes flank it: all base and no modifier i