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contentVercel

Be Clear and Concise

MUST

MUST: Write the sentence, then delete words until deleting one more would change the meaning. Cut padding phrases ("in order to", "please note that", "at this time"); keep the nouns and the verb, drop the ceremony.

Cut every word that does not change the meaning, then ship the shortest version that still says it

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Nobody reads interface copy — they scan it, and every extra word is another thing to skip past before the action becomes visible. Padding phrases ("in order to", "please note that", "at this time") add length without adding information, and on a button they push the verb past the point where the eye stops. Write the sentence, then delete words until deleting one more would change what it means. Concise is not terse: keep the nouns and the verb, drop the ceremony.

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.