Style Guide Enforcer

House style is a promise of consistency, and it is kept mechanically or not at all. This skill applies a style guide to a document the way a linter applies rules to code: one category at a time, every edit logged against the rule that demanded it, and every place where the guide is silent, self-contradictory, or at war with clarity surfaced to a human instead of silently resolved.

When to use this skill

• A document must comply with a house style guide before publication
• Multiple authors produced sections that disagree on terminology, capitalization, or formatting
• A style guide exists but nobody can tell whether a given document actually follows it
• No guide exists and a minimal defaults sheet must be proposed before any editing
• An editor's changes need to be auditable — every edit traceable to a rule

Instructions

1. Load the guide and extract enforceable rules into a checklist, grouped: terminology and product naming, capitalization, numbers and dates, punctuation, formatting and structure, voice and usage. Rules that cannot be checked ("write engagingly") are noted and set aside — they are coaching, not enforcement.
2. If no guide exists, propose a one-page defaults sheet — naming, date format, number style, heading case, list punctuation — and get sign-off before editing a word. Enforcing rules nobody agreed to is just having opinions loudly.
3. Pass the document one category at a time, in the order above. Mixed passes miss things: the eye checking hyphenation is not also checking date formats, whatever it believes about itself.
4. Terminology first, because it changes the most text: approved names spelled and capitalized per the guide, banned words replaced with their sanctioned alternatives, and one term per concept throughout — a document that alternates between synonyms reads like three authors in a trench coat.
5. Then the mechanics, exactly as the guide dictates rather than as personal preference suggests: number style and spell-out thresholds, date formats, unit spacing, serial comma, quotation punctuation, heading capitalization.
6. Log every change as it is made: location, before, after, and the rule ID that required it. An edit that cannot cite a rule is reclassified as a suggestion and moved to a separate list.
7. Collect conflicts rather than resolving them: the guide contradicts itself, the guide fights clarity, two rules collide on one sentence. These go to the guide's owner with a one-line recommendation each — enforcers do not legislate.
8. Deliver three artifacts: the corrected text, the change log, and the conflicts-and- suggestions list.

Output format

Change log — <document>, against <guide name, version>
| # | Location | Before          | After            | Rule    |
|---|----------|-----------------|------------------|---------|
| 1 | s2, p1   | sign up (noun)  | signup           | TERM-04 |
| 2 | s2, p3   | 15th March      | 15 March 2026    | DATE-01 |

Conflicts for the guide owner:
- <where> — <rule A> vs <rule B, or clarity> — recommendation: <one line>

Suggestions (no rule attached): <kept separate, clearly optional>

Guardrails

• Style only. Meaning, facts, structure, and argument are untouched; if a rule seems to require a meaning change, that is a conflict, not an edit.
• No rule, no edit. Taste travels in the suggestions list, clearly labeled as taste.
• Quoted material, legal boilerplate, and citations are exempt from restyling — flagged where they clash with the guide, never altered.
• The guide beats the enforcer's instinct, and the guide's owner beats the guide.
• The change log is complete enough to reconstruct the original. Silent edits are the one banned move.