Voice Preserving Line Edit

Voice-Preserving Line Edit

A finishing pass for prose that is already written. It hunts throat-clearing before the point, inanimate things doing human work, binary contrasts that announce an insight instead of delivering it, and rhythm that never varies.

Two things separate this from a generic anti-slop rule sheet:

1. Every rule is contextual. Adverbs, passive voice, third-person register, and em dashes are not banned outright. Each is cut only when it weakens this piece, in this genre, under this house style. A technical adverb, a conventional passive, an academic register, and a house-approved em dash all survive the pass.
2. There is an audit mode. Ask for findings and you get quoted issues, reasons, and minimum corrections, with your text returned unchanged. The rewrite mode is opt-in, not the only setting.

These are writing-quality signals. They are not evidence of who or what wrote the text, and this skill never claims otherwise.

What This Skill Does

• Finds and, on request, removes filler phrases, business jargon, empty intensifiers, formulaic structures, false agency, vague declaratives, and metronomic rhythm in finished prose.
• Preserves the author's voice: deliberate fragments, dry humor, technical vocabulary, chosen formality, and useful rough edges.
• Preserves the record: facts, numbers, dates, names, prices, claims, qualifiers, quotations, code, commands, links, citations, and paths pass through untouched.
• Runs in either of two modes, findings-only audit or cleaning pass, each with its own fixed output contract.
• Scores the result on five dimensions out of 50 and returns a CLEAN or REVISE verdict about the prose quality.

What it does not do: write new copy, restructure an argument, fact-check, guess at authorship, or publish anything. See Boundaries.

When to Use This Skill

• Before copy, a README, an email, a social post, or a doc ships
• After a long AI-assisted writing session
• When the text sounds fine but feels generated
• Before anything goes to press, to investors, or to customers
• When someone wants the issues identified without a rewrite
• When a draft has to keep a specific author's voice and a generic cleanup would erase it

Do not run it on fiction, conversational replies, or internal notes where a loose voice is intentional. When the request is findings only, report the issues and leave the supplied text unchanged.

How to Use

Basic

Hand the skill a block of prose and ask for a cleanup:

Run a voice-preserving line edit on this README intro.
<paste text>

You get the cleaned prose first, then a change report and a 50-point score.

Advanced

Findings-only audit. Use the words detect, flag, review, diagnose, audit, or do not rewrite:

Audit this launch email for slop. Findings only, do not rewrite it.

You get quoted issues split into Clear issues and Judgment calls, with a minimum correction for each. Your text comes back unchanged.

Supply a house style. A company or author style brief overrides the defaults in this skill, including punctuation and register:

Line-edit this page. House style: em dashes are fine, we write in
third person, and "platform" is our term, never "ecosystem".

Supply author context. The example rewrites below only get specific because the source supplied the specifics. If real numbers, names, or before/after figures exist, paste them alongside the draft. Without them the skill marks the gap rather than inventing a filler.

Run the deep sweep. The 25-row table below is the high-frequency cut. For press, investor, or customer-facing text, or when the table comes back clean and the prose still reads generated, run the full list in references/kill-list.md.

Scope the pass. Ask for a subset when only part of the problem matters, for example "structural patterns only, leave word choice alone."

Advisory, not blocking

Every check, gate, score, and verdict in this skill is a recommendation to the user, not a control on the agent.

• Run every check and report the results honestly. Verdicts (CLEAN, REVISE, a score below threshold) are advice attached to the work, not orders that change it.
• Never block, delay, skip, or refuse the action the user asked for because a check failed. Complete the request as asked and deliver the check output alongside it, clearly labeled as a recommendation.
• A failed check changes what you report, never what you do.
• Single exception: if a finding is extremely risky, such as legal or rights exposure, a claim that could mislead a customer or investor, or irreversible public damage, pause, state the risk and the options, and let the user pick. Their choice is final.

Before the pass

1. Choose the deliverable. Default to cleaned prose. Use a findings-only audit when the user says detect, flag, review, diagnose, audit, or do not rewrite.
2. Lock the source. Preserve facts, numbers, dates, names, prices, claims, quotations, qualifiers, code, commands, links, citations, and paths.
3. Lock the voice. Preserve deliberate fragments, dry humor, technical vocabulary, formality, and useful rough edges. Remove a pattern only when it weakens this piece in this context.
4. Read the house style. A supplied company or author brief overrides the punctuation and register defaults in this skill.

Make the minimum effective edit. Never add anecdotes, customers, metrics, quotes, first-person experience, or specificity that the source did not supply.

The eight rules

1. Cut filler phrases

No throat-clearing before the point. No emphasis crutches that add weight without meaning. No adverbs doing work a specific fact should do.

The kill list, 25 highest-frequency offenders:

The table is the high-frequency cut. The full sweep, with forty-plus more phrases across every category, lives in references/kill-list.md; run it when the text goes to press, to investors, or to customers. Three categories the table compresses:

• Adverbs, contextual rule. Cut adverbs that merely intensify, soften, or announce importance. Keep an adverb when it carries factual, technical, legal, quoted, or voice-specific meaning.
• Meta-commentary. The piece moves; it never announces its own structure. Cut "Let me walk you through", "In this section, we'll", "As we'll see", "Plot twist:", "Hint:", "But that's another post", "X is a feature, not a bug".
• Performative sincerity. False intimacy and announced significance. Cut "I promise", "creeps in", "This is genuinely hard", "This is what X actually looks like", "actually matters". Show the difficulty; never claim it.

Bad: "Here's the thing: this is genuinely hard. Let that sink in." Good: "This is hard."

2. Break formulaic structures

The patterns a model reaches for when it has nothing original to say. Each with its fix:

• Binary contrast ("It's not about speed. It's about precision.") | Fix: state the real claim directly. "Precision matters more than speed here."
• "Isn't just" construction ("This isn't just a tool, it's a platform.") | Fix: cut the setup; say what it is with one proof.
• Negative listing ("No setup. No config. No hassle.") | Fix: one positive sentence naming what the user does.
• Dramatic fragment ("One problem." / "And it worked.") | Fix: attach the fragment to the sentence it modifies.
• Rhetorical setup ("So what does this mean for you?" / "What if I told you...?" / "Think about it:") | Fix: delete the question; give the answer.
• False agency ("The data tells us" / "the decision emerges" / "the culture shifts" / "the market rewards") | Fix: name the person. "We measured." "I argue." If no one fits, use "you".
• Triad rhythm ("Faster. Cleaner. Better.") | Fix: two items, or a full sentence. Three-beat lists only when the count is really three.
• Reveal fragment ("[Noun]. That's it. That's the [thing].") | Fix: one complete sentence, no staged reveal.
• Formulaic template ("By the time X, I was Y." / "X that isn't Y") | Fix: drop the template; state the fact. "X is broken."
• Permission grant ("And that's okay.") | Fix: cut it; the reader did not ask.

Binary contrast alone has eleven spellings ("The answer isn't X. It's Y." / "It feels like X. It's actually Y." / "stops being X and starts being Y" and more); the full variant table is in references/kill-list.md.

Bad: "It's not about speed. It's about precision." Good: "Precision matters more than speed here."

3. Prefer active voice when the actor matters

Name the actor when responsibility or causality matters. Keep passive voice when the actor is unknown, immaterial, deliberately withheld, or conventional in the technical context. Do not force a human subject into a sentence that does not need one.

Bad: "The decision was reached after careful consideration." Good: "The team decided after reviewing three options."

Bad: "Mistakes were made." Good: Name who made them.

4. Be specific

No vague declaratives. No lazy extremes. Name the specific thing.

Lazy extremes are every, always, never, everyone, everybody, nobody: false authority doing vague work. Vague declaratives announce weight without naming it: "The reasons are structural", "The stakes are high", "This is the deepest problem", "The consequences are real".

Bad: "The implications are significant." Good: Name the implication.

Bad: "Everyone knows this." Good: Name who knows it and what they know.

5. Put the reader in the room when the genre supports it

Specifics beat abstractions. In direct guidance, "you" often beats a vague "people." Preserve third-person, academic, legal, or documentary register when the source calls for it.

Bad: "Nobody designed this. It just happened." Good: "You didn't sit down and decide to build this. It accumulated."

6. Vary rhythm

Mix sentence lengths. Two items often beat three. End paragraphs differently. Follow the supplied house style for em dashes; with no house style given, replace them with commas, parentheses, colons, or periods. Never treat punctuation as evidence of authorship.

Three consecutive sentences at the same length: break one. Every paragraph ending with a punchy one-liner: vary it. Staccato fragments stacked for effect: merge them. A question answered in the same breath: let it breathe or cut it. Hedging dressed as reassurance ("Not always. Not perfectly."): cut it.

Sentence starters count as rhythm. Wh- openers ("What makes this hard is...") read as a crutch: lead with the subject ("The constraint is..."). Paragraphs opening with "So": start with content. Sentences opening with "Look,": remove.

7. Trust the reader

State facts directly. Skip softening, justification, hand-holding. The reader is an adult.

Cut: "I want to be clear that..." / "It's important to note that..." / "As you might expect..." Start with the content.

8. Cut quotables

If a sentence sounds like it was written to be screenshotted, rewrite it. Pull-quote prose is manufactured. Cut the performance.