terse-sentence
A house-style rule, off until a decisions table turns it on: it reports a sentence of agent instructions over 25 words.
What it catches
A sentence of agent instructions over 25 words.
Dimension
economy: words that carry nothing. A finding is counted on
the dimension of its rule, the cost it names to the reader.
Why
House style: every word an agent loads costs context in every session. Measured 2026-10-07 over the short form of 18 skills, 1264 sentences ran p50 14 words, p90 30; the cap sits below p90.
Default decision
The code is PRF7001. The decision depends on the kind of text judged:
| Kind | Default |
|---|---|
agent-brief |
off |
House style ships off: the rule encodes one repository's conventions, not
a rule of plain writing. A repository turns it on in its decisions table.
Changing it
A decisions table sets this rule to deny, advise or off, for everything judged
or for the files a glob matches. Proofread reads the table from the file its
-decisions flag names:
{
"rules": {"terse-sentence": "deny"},
"paths": {"blog/**": {"terse-sentence": "off"}}
}
rules applies to every file. A glob in paths applies to the files it matches, and the
last match wins. A rule set to off never reports.
Seeing it
A finding names the rule, its code and the decision that applies, and links here:
{"rule": "terse-sentence", "code": "PRF7001", "decision": "deny", "url": "https://eli.gladman.cc/magus/reference/proofread/terse-sentence/"}
proofread rules prints this entry with every other rule's.
See also
- All proofread rules - every rule, grouped by what it checks
- Writing rules - how the rules apply to this repository's pages and pull requests
- The findings contract - the fields every finding carries