Writing Quality

A gate, not a suggestion. Any prose leaving the building passes through here first.

When to use

• Automatically, on every piece of prose headed to an external reader
• Any copy inside a deliverable, including copy presented as an option or a proposal
• When somebody asks whether something reads as machine-written

Framing does not exempt text. Copy labeled "suggested", "draft", or "just an option" is still copy somebody will paste into an external surface, and it gets the same pass.

Inputs

• Reads: workspace/agents/context/voice.md if it exists, otherwise the defaults below
• Needs from user: nothing

Workflow

1. Strip the structural tells

These patterns are the clearest machine signatures in business prose, and they survive most editing passes because they read as confident.

2. Strip the vocabulary

Delete or replace: unlock, leverage as a verb, supercharge, seamless, robust, holistic, synergy, game-changing, cutting-edge, best-in-class, elevate, empower, harness, navigate the landscape, at the end of the day, dive deep, double click, and any sentence containing "in an era of".

"Leverage" as a noun meaning negotiating power is fine. The verb is not.

3. Fix the punctuation habits

• No em dashes. A period, a comma, or a rewrite. This is a hard rule
• No semicolons in prose. Two sentences
• Sparse parentheses. More than one aside per paragraph means the sentence structure is wrong
• No exclamation marks in business prose

4. Cut the hedging

Delete: "it's worth noting that", "it's important to remember", "arguably", "in many ways", "to some extent", and stacked qualifiers. One qualifier is precision. Three is a lack of a position.

5. Cut the summary of what was just said

If a paragraph restates the previous paragraph in different words, delete it. Machine prose summarizes compulsively, and the summary is always the weaker version.

6. Read the first line honestly

If the opening sentence could introduce any document on this topic, it is not an opening. Start at the specific claim.

7. Strip invisible characters

Zero-width characters, bidirectional marks, tag characters, and exotic spaces travel invisibly through copy-paste and show up in other people's tooling. Scan and strip them as the last step, after wording is final.

Report the count.

Output

• Returns the cleaned prose
• Prints the receipt:

writing-quality: <n> structural tells, <n> vocabulary, <n> punctuation fixed
invisible-characters: <n> stripped | none

Rules & quality bar

• This gate never gets skipped on external-facing prose, whatever the framing
• No em dashes, no semicolons in prose. Hard rules
• The receipt is mandatory. A missing receipt means the gate did not run, never that it passed silently
• Wording is final before the invisible-character strip, so the strip changes nothing visible
• Do not soften a claim while cleaning it. Cleaning is not hedging
• Delete rather than replace filler. A cut sentence is better than a rewritten empty one

Related skills

• Runs inside: artifact-eval as its first gate
• Reads: the voice module from context-portfolio