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contentVercel

Write in Active Voice

MUST

MUST: Write instructions, empty states, and errors in active voice — "Install the CLI", not "The CLI will be installed".

Lead every instruction with the verb the user performs, not with what happens to them

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Passive constructions hide the actor, so the reader has to reconstruct who does what before they can act. Active voice puts the verb first and cuts word count, which matters most in instructions, empty states, and error copy where the user is already stuck.

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.