Simplified Technical English

ASD-STE100 is a controlled language written so that a maintenance technician reading a second language can follow a procedure without misreading it. It has two halves: writing rules, and a dictionary that fixes one meaning per word.

This skill adopts part of the first half. It never ships the second.

The one-line version

An operator can get most of the value by naming the standard:

## Communication style
Use ASD-STE-100 when you speak to the operator.

That works because the name pulls a whole register the model already knows, at a cost of one line. Skill(imbue:latent-space-engineering) covers the technique in its named-register-invocation module, together with the known failure mode: practitioners report that the constraint decays partway through a long session. The checks below exist because guidance decays and counting does not.

What this skill is not

This is an STE-derived authoring aid. It is not an implementation of ASD-STE100, and no output of it may be called STE compliant. Read modules/licensing.md before writing anything that describes this work to a reader outside the project. The short version: the standard is free to download but not freely licensed, the controlled dictionary cannot be redistributed, and ASD states that it does not endorse or certify sellers of tools claimed to be fully compliant.

Vocabulary checking is therefore out of scope. Rules that depend on the approved-word list are not adopted and cannot be.

Decide the scope first

STE applies to some text in this repository and would damage the rest. Get this wrong and the 20-word cap starts deleting the reasoning that docstrings and ADRs exist to carry.

Apply STE	Do not apply STE
Runbook and installation steps	Docstrings that explain why
Agent replies to the operator	ADRs and design rationale
Error messages and warnings	Book content and blog output
Command and skill instructions	Commit message bodies
Checklists	This repository's own prose docs

The last row is the one that bites. These skill files are descriptive repo prose, so the house rules govern them, not STE. Full reasoning and worked before-and-after pairs: modules/scope-boundaries.md.

The adopted rules

Four limits, corroborated across independent public restatements:

Limit	Value
Procedural sentence	20 words
Descriptive sentence	25 words
Sentences per paragraph	6
Words in a noun cluster	3

Plus: one instruction per sentence, active voice in procedures, simple tenses only, no contractions, no semicolons, and American spelling. Each restated in our own words in modules/adopted-rules.md, with the rules deliberately not adopted and why.

Running the checks

Three checks need counting or noun detection, so they are code:

cd plugins/scribe && PYTHONPATH=src uv run python -m scribe.ste FILE.md

Each finding prints as file:line: [rule/confidence] detail. The command exits 0 whenever it could read the files, because these checks are advisory and the noun-cluster rule must never gate a merge. Pass --no-noun-clusters to see only the two counting rules, which is the usual way to read a file that has never been checked before.

Four more are regex and live in the language pack, gated off so a routine slop sweep never runs them:

cd plugins/scribe && uv run python -c "
import sys; sys.path.insert(0, 'src')
from scribe.pattern_loader import get_ste_patterns, load_language_patterns
for e in get_ste_patterns(load_language_patterns('en'), include_optional=True):
    print(e['category'], e['confidence'], len(e['patterns']), 'patterns')
"

Mask code, tables, and frontmatter before you run the regex set. The scribe.ste checks already do this.

Read the findings honestly

Measured across 5984 markdown files in this repository:

Check	Files affected	Per file
sentence_length	39%	0.8
paragraph_length	1%	0.0
noun_cluster	76%	3.0

A noun-cluster finding is advisory. Detection subtracts function words and verb forms and calls what is left a noun, which a real part-of-speech tagger would do better. Reread the phrase it points at. Do not rewrite on it, and never gate a merge on it.

What the confidence on a finding means

Each finding prints its own confidence, and the three rules earn it differently.

Confidence	Where it appears
high	Every paragraph finding, and any sentence over 25 words
medium	A sentence of 21 to 25 words whose register was inferred
low	Every noun-cluster finding

Past 25 words a sentence is over both limits, so the count settles it and the register does not matter. Between 21 and 25 words the finding exists only because the sentence was read as procedural, and when that reading came through a stripped label it is published as medium. Across the corpus 11% of sentence findings are medium.

A label is stripped because list items here open with **Label**:, and classifying on the label leaves most of them unreadable. The cost is that the sentence's real opening is discarded. Triggers: push to master then reads as an instruction to push rather than a description of when a workflow fires. Nothing in the body separates it from Merge to master, which is a real instruction, so the evidence has to be the label, and the label is kept for that purpose.

One label shape is evidence and the rest are not. A one-word plural label names a set, so the words after it are that set's members and the first of them is a noun whatever the verb lexicon says. A procedural reading is withdrawn when it arrived through such a label. Fix: and Action: name one thing and are followed by a real instruction often enough to prove nothing, so they keep their reading. Across the corpus 215 sentences carry a plural label, and one of them sits in the band where the register decides whether it reports.

For every other label the reading is right about five times in six, so the class is kept and the doubt is published with it. Read a medium finding before you act on it.

One limit worth knowing before you trust a clean run: 61% of sentences cannot be classified as procedural or descriptive, and those get the looser 25-word limit. The checker under-reports rather than over-reports. A clean run is weaker evidence than a dirty one.

That number stays high because most sentences open with a noun, and no word list reaches them. Across the corpus the unclassified sentences begin with 9407 distinct words, of which the commonest 60 cover 30%. Reclassifying them would also change almost nothing, because unknown text already receives the descriptive limit. Only unknown text that is really procedural is under-reported, and that was measured at about 20 findings across the whole repository.

Exit Criteria

• The text's register is decided against the scope table above, and text outside the Apply column is left alone.
• python -m scribe.ste runs over the target file and every line it prints is read. The command exits 0 either way, so the exit state carries no information.
• Every sentence_length finding is fixed or has a stated reason to stand.
• No noun_cluster finding was auto-rewritten.
• Nothing produced claims STE compliance, certification, or endorsement.
• No word from the ASD controlled dictionary was copied into the repository.