writing-simply

Rewrite the text using ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English rules: active voice, short common words, one instruction per sentence, and no marketing adjectives. Then run ste-lint.py on the draft to get a violations-per-100-words score and iterate until it drops.

ASD-STE100 is a controlled language written for aircraft maintenance manuals where a misread sentence can cause real harm. It enforces one name per thing, approved vocabulary, active voice, and strict sentence length limits, which strips out the voice patterns associated with AI-generated prose.

Run ste-lint.py on the file or pipe the text through stdin. It reports violations per 100 words for passive voice, nominalizations, banned words, and marketing adjectives, plus a separate em dash count, which is a common AI prose marker.

Avoid STE for prose that needs a voice: essays, marketing copy, conference talks, and persuasive writing. STE strips voice on purpose, so it removes the quality those formats depend on. Use it for documentation, runbooks, and error messages instead.

Strict mode applies every rule and both sentence length caps, and suits procedures, runbooks, and safety text. STE-flavored mode keeps the sentence, paragraph, and active-voice discipline but relaxes the dictionary lockdown, suiting READMEs and PR descriptions.

No. The linter covers only the machine-checkable subset of STE, such as sentence length and banned words. Full compliance also requires judgment a checker cannot supply, like choosing the correct technical noun or verifying a sentence makes sense.