Anti-slop

Improve the reader's understanding while keeping the author's meaning and voice. Default to the smallest useful edit. A successful pass can leave a paragraph unchanged.

Work from the text

Establish the audience, purpose, and requested action. A review returns findings; an edit changes the requested material. Read enough surrounding text to understand the argument and distinguish the author's habits from an isolated awkward line.

Preserve facts, qualifications, examples, links, technical identifiers, and the distinction between planned, implemented, and tested behavior. Keep the reasons and transitions that connect the argument. A wording pass is not a summary.

Use the supplied facts for a wording-only edit. Separate a suspected factual problem from the editorial fix: flag it or check the relevant source when that is in scope. Do not silently strengthen, weaken, or resolve the claim to make the sentence cleaner. Never invent an anecdote, motive, feeling, or first-person experience to make writing sound human.

Edit the passage, not its vocabulary

First identify what the sentence contributes. Remove repeated information or ceremony, then repair only the connections the cut affects.

Watch for passages that stage a revelation, announce honesty, praise the author's own skepticism, ask a question merely to deliver a punchline, or close every section with a slogan. Keep the actual correction, evidence, or implication. Treat these as contextual signals, not forbidden strings. A real change of mind can be essential to an essay. Retain what the author previously believed and what changed it when the text supplies those facts. An opener such as "there goes a line I'd been leaning on" alone supplies neither; cut it without inventing the missing belief.

Replace an empty promise with the supported behavior and its limits. If those facts are missing, flag the gap. Do not substitute a quieter unsupported promise.

Keep useful jokes, profanity, contractions, opinions, and varied sentence lengths already present in the author's work. Do not manufacture casualness with new slang, deliberate mistakes, clipped fragments, or a stock cynical persona.

For technical instructions, make actors, conditions, sequence, and consequences clear. Split a sentence when its structure obscures those relationships; keep related clauses together when that makes the relationship easier to follow. For blogs and portfolio pages, retain the argument and the reasons the author cares. A page about an unfinished project must remain clear about its status.

Word lists and lint matches suggest places to look. They do not establish authorship or prove a defect. Passive voice, contrast, ordinary adjectives, headings, apologies, and lists can all serve a real purpose. There is no sentence length cap, mandatory STE grammar, or target reduction percentage.

Compare before finishing

Read the revision against the original. Check for lost examples and arguments, changed uncertainty or numbers, missing conditions, newly invented experience, and a replacement voice that is uniformly terse or polished. Restore anything meaningful lost merely for brevity. Read the paragraph as a whole for rhythm and logical connections.

Return the requested edit. For a review, cite the passage, its reader-facing problem, and a specific correction. Report only material unresolved questions and verification limits. Do not add a ceremonial account of the editing process.

For a difficult passage, consult structural-patterns.md. Other references cover word choice, technical clarity, and responding to corrections.