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From kjgarza-product
Write prose in The New Yorker's distinctive literary style. Applies the magazine's house conventions (diaeresis, British spellings, serial comma), elegant sentence construction, and commitment to clarity. Use when writing essays, articles, profiles, long-form journalism, or any sophisticated prose. Triggers on requests for "New Yorker style," literary writing, magazine-quality prose, or elegant nonfiction.
npx claudepluginhub kjgarza/marketplace-claude --plugin kjgarza-productHow this skill is triggered — by the user, by Claude, or both
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/kjgarza-product:new-yorker-styleThe summary Claude sees in its skill listing — used to decide when to auto-load this skill
Write with clarity, harmony, truth, and unfailing courtesy to the reader. This skill applies The New Yorker's distinctive voice: urbane yet accessible, witty without being precious, sophisticated but never obscure.
Applies Strunk's Elements of Style principles to writing or editing prose: omit needless words, use active voice, prefer positive form, and keep related words together.
Enforces a hard-edged, muscular English prose style without AI tics or filler. Useful for essays, rewrites, or any writing needing clean, forceful, concrete language.
Applies AP, Chicago, or custom house style to a manuscript, correcting capitalization, punctuation, numbers, abbreviations, and usage inconsistencies with a detailed change log.
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Write with clarity, harmony, truth, and unfailing courtesy to the reader. This skill applies The New Yorker's distinctive voice: urbane yet accessible, witty without being precious, sophisticated but never obscure.
Ved Mehta, staff writer from 1961–1994, distilled the style: "Clarity, harmony, truth and unfailing courtesy to the reader."
David Foster Wallace articulated what this means in practice:
"In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there's some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader—even though it's mediated by a kind of text—there's an electricity about it."
The reader cannot read your mind. Every word must earn its place.
Follow a long, complex sentence with a short, punchy one:
"By 2000, the investigation of the helicopter-conversion industry was winding down, with disappointing results for Wales and the U.S. Attorney's Office. Only one case remained."
Begin paragraphs with short sentences when appropriate:
"Progress came slowly. Anderson remained the only suspect; in 2004, the Seattle Times reported that the F.B.I. had searched Anderson's home."
Start sentences with light openers—transitional words, subordinate clauses, or scene-setting phrases:
"Wales, an Assistant United States Attorney in Seattle, had planned to have dinner with his girlfriend. But that afternoon Wales called and said he had projects to work on at home."
Link the first sentence of a paragraph to the last sentence of the preceding one:
"Neither Wales's romantic life nor the fender bender yielded promising leads in the murder investigation.
Wales's work on gun control also failed to produce suspects."
Convey chronology through transition phrases rather than bare dates:
The New Yorker follows "close punctuation"—commas fall with precision, as E.B. White observed, "like knives in a circus act, outlining the victim."
Always use it:
"She bought apples, oranges, and pears."
Set off explanatory phrases with em dashes for emphasis and clarity:
"The proposal brought out the full might of the gun-control lobby, which spent four million dollars—primarily on television advertisements and direct-mail appeals—and voters rejected the measure."
Use dashes when commas would create ambiguity.
Reserve for parallel constructions:
"United States Attorneys establish the priorities for each of the nation's ninety-four judicial districts and announce significant indictments; Assistant U.S. Attorneys are more like civil servants; they perform the day-to-day work."
Use to introduce an explanation that could stand as a complete sentence:
"The phrase was partly a joke, a bit of feigned grandiosity to justify a tendency toward excessive meticulousness: Wales did things slowly."
Hyphenate phrasal adjectives for clarity:
The New Yorker uses the diaeresis (not umlaut) over the second vowel in doubled-vowel pairs to indicate a new syllable:
Also retain accents in borrowed words:
Double consonants where American usage would not:
Wallace advocated writing by hand for early drafts: "Writing makes me slow down in a way that helps me pay attention." Whether handwritten or typed, the first draft should emerge slowly enough for genuine thought.
"One of the things that's good about writing and practicing writing is it's a great remedy for my natural self-involvement and self-centeredness... I never forget there's someone on the end of the line, that I owe that person certain allegiances."
Each revision asks: Does this serve the reader?
Wallace's humbling insight for every writer:
"I am not, in and of myself, interesting to a reader. If I want to seem interesting, work has to be done in order to make myself interesting."
In 1927, The New Yorker ran an article about Edna St. Vincent Millay with multiple errors, and her mother threatened to sue. The magazine developed the most rigorous fact-checking process in American journalism.
Apply this standard:
| Element | New Yorker Style |
|---|---|
| Serial comma | Always |
| Theatre/theater | theatre |
| Focused/focussed | focussed |
| Traveled/travelled | travelled |
| Cooperate | coöperate |
| Naive | naïve |
| Elite | élite |
| Teenager | teen-ager |
| Percent | per cent |
| Website | website (as of 2025) |
| Internet | internet (as of 2025) |
For detailed spelling lists and additional punctuation rules, see references/style-details.md.