AI agent skill · by @provos

Summary Style Guide

Tone and length conventions for email summaries — voice, verb tense, what to include vs omit, and target sentence count. Read this when writing the prose Summary line for each email so the voice is consistent across the report.

Archived 2026-10-23 · Source updated 2026-10-07 · License: Apache-2.0. Check the original repository for the latest version.

SKILL.md instructions

# Summary style guide

Each email in the report gets a one- or two-sentence prose summary. This
document covers the _voice_ of those sentences. For the surrounding
markdown structure, the heading depth, and where the summary sits in the
document, see the email-formatting conventions.

## Voice and tense

- Third-person, past tense. "Alice asked the team to review the deck"
  rather than "I am asking..." or "Alice is asking...".
- Drop the salutation, the signature, and any thread quoting. The
  summary is what the email _did_, not how it was framed.
- Active voice. "Bob declined the meeting" not "the meeting was declined
  by Bob".

## What to include

The summary should answer: _what is the actionable substance of this
email?_ Concretely:

- The ask, decision, or status update at the heart of the message.
- Who is on the hook for what, if explicit.
- Any deadline or date that anchors the action.

## What to omit

- Niceties ("Thanks!", "Hope you're well", "Cheers").
- The sender's restatement of what they previously said in the thread.
- Speculation about why the email was sent.
- Any attachment list — that's separate metadata, not summary content.

## Length

- Prefer one sentence. Use two when the email genuinely covers two
  distinct items (e.g., a status update _and_ an unrelated ask).
- Hard cap: two sentences. If a summary feels like it needs three, the
  email contains multiple threads of substance and the summary should
  pick the most actionable one and drop the rest.

## Confidence and hedging

If the email is ambiguous or the body is truncated, write a confident
summary of what's visible rather than hedging. Do not insert "appears
to" or "seems to be" — the consumer of the summary already knows it
was machine-derived.