How to Write Powerful Sentences

Dickie Bush shares eight concrete sentence-level writing rules he uses daily, then demonstrates how he turned them into a downloadable Claude .skill file for automated editing.

Key Ideas

Eight rules for stronger sentences: (1) End strong — make the last word the most impactful. (2) Define your contractions — write out terms fully before abbreviating. (3) Say it in fewer words — hunt and remove small unnecessary words. (4) Don’t repeat yourself — avoid restating the same point in different words. (5) Vary your word choice — swap repeated terms for synonyms. (6) One advanced word per sentence — fourth-grade baseline plus one challenging word for flavor. (7) The two-comma rule — most sentences should have max two commas; three to six is the valley of death. (8) Kill your adverbs — remove adverbs that repeat what the verb already says.

Because these rules are objective and provable, they can be transferred to an AI editor. Dickie fed his YouTube transcript to Claude Cowork, which turned it into a SKILL.md file with all 8 principles formatted as editing instructions. The skill was installed in his Skills folder, giving Claude permanent access to his editing brain. A downloadable .skill file is provided for readers to use.

RDCO Relevance

Excellent craft-level writing advice that applies directly to Sanity Check editorial quality. The .skill cloning concept demonstrates practical AI-assisted content creation. The rules themselves are worth internalizing for our own writing. Bootcamp promotion embedded.