Deslop

Remove formulaic writing that obscures meaning or flattens the author's voice. Name the reader's problem before editing: an unsupported claim, a repeated conclusion, an unclear actor, or a sentence that needs rereading. A recognizable word or construction alone is not a defect.

Preserve meaning first. Keep facts, qualifications, attribution, and the author's stance. Improve clarity within the requested scope. Never invent measurements, mechanisms, anecdotes, or confidence to make a vague sentence sound specific. NO_EDITS is a successful result when the draft already works.

Surface first

The user, publication, and project contract set the register. An artifact's authority skill decides its structure; this skill supplies prose diagnostics.

Read references/surface-profiles.md when a surface needs a worked example. A writing sample guides voice only when its author is the one you are writing for; other people's and other agents' messages in a thread are context, not a sample. A sample does not override an explicit instruction from the user.

A focused editing loop

Use the depth the artifact needs. A short message can be edited in one pass. For a long or consequential document, separate diagnosis from rewriting so the rewrite has an explicit target. Independent review can help when semantic drift would be costly; a second model is not proof of correctness.

digraph deslop {
  rankdir=LR;
  node [shape=box];
  scope [label="Identify reader and protected content"];
  diagnose [label="Name a concrete defect"];
  edit [label="Make the smallest useful edit"];
  verify [label="Compare meaning and scan"];
  scope -> diagnose -> edit -> verify;
  verify -> diagnose [label="specific unresolved defect"];
}

For an audit, report the span, defect, and suggested edit without changing the artifact. For an authorized rewrite, keep the diagnosis internal unless the user asks for it. Do not manufacture a finding quota or require several weak markers before fixing one clear ambiguity.

Mechanical scan

Run the bundled scanner from the repository root, or resolve its path relative to this skill's directory when installed elsewhere:

perl skills/deslop/scripts/slopscan.pl --surface house FILE...
# Surfaces: house | published | agent | sample
# --show-masked lists protected hits suppressed by the masker.
# Exit: 0 no findings, 10 candidates, 20 hard findings, 30 unreadable input.

Choose house for our prose, agent for our instruction files, and published or sample for another author's work. The house dash ban is a style requirement, not evidence of authorship. Typography on other surfaces needs contextual judgment (a non-breaking space may be intentional localization).

The scanner is read-only and uses a heuristic Markdown masker. It protects frontmatter, code, blockquotes, comments, and link targets. It also reports raw hard hits suppressed by masking; inspect those when quoting or nested lists make the mask uncertain. A known limitation is a list fence whose closing indentation exceeds three spaces. A clean exit establishes only that the enabled checks found nothing in the visible text they recognized. It does not establish prose quality or parser completeness.

Treat candidates as prompts to inspect, never automatic replacements. Rhythm diagnostics are descriptive: short technical instructions can legitimately have uniform sentence lengths. Run scripts/selftest.sh after changing scanner behavior.

Read in order of consequence

Start with missing meaning or a confusing argument, then work toward sentence detail. These are diagnostic lenses, not five mandatory invocations:

The catalog in references/pattern-catalog.md gives stable IDs and examples. Consult relevant entries instead of loading every rule for every artifact. The craft moves in references/craft-moves.md help when a sentence's shape is the problem.

Preservation contract

• Preserve code, commands, configuration, quoted language, links, and required metadata unless their modification is part of the request.
• Preserve negation, quantities, units, scope, time, and causal strength. Changing "may" to "will" or "associated with" to "causes" changes the claim.
• Keep every substantive fact unless the user requested substantive cuts. Remove repetition only when its function is also redundant (reminders in procedures can be necessary).
• Reuse defined terms. Synonym variation can accidentally invent a second component or loosen a contractual term.
• Keep protected legal text and meaningful safety instructions even when they sound formulaic.
• Match the author's voice. Do not manufacture errors, arbitrary sentence variation, personal experience, or artificial informality.

Examples in the references are illustrative. Added specifics are usable only when the source material supports them. If a vague draft lacks the necessary facts, keep a plain version or flag what evidence is missing.

Verify the edit

Compare the original and revised text for changed meaning before scanning typography. Check that every new factual clause has support and that deleted clauses did not carry a requirement, exception, or qualification. Use the actual diff for files; reread the complete artifact when edits changed its structure.

Fix identified regressions and repeat the relevant check. Stop when the requested improvements are complete and no concrete defect remains. Do not chase a detector score, a sentence-length target, a percentage reduction, or a vague feeling that a text still sounds generated.

For difficult passages, useful questions are: what would deletion lose; what does a named source actually support; could this paragraph describe any project; and does the same term mean the same thing throughout? A required boilerplate paragraph can pass even when it is portable.

Invocation modes

Default to embedded when another skill invokes this one. An audit request does not authorize file edits or publication.

Research boundary

Studies show differences between particular model outputs and human corpora. They do not establish universal forbidden constructions or predict Astra's writing on a new task. Technical prose, fiction, and biomedical abstracts have different requirements. Use research to challenge folklore and identify candidates, then judge the actual text. Verified sources, limits, and maintenance guidance live in references/evidence.md.

Anti-patterns

What This Skill is NOT

• An authorship detector or a detector-evasion tool. Never infer who wrote a passage from stylistic markers.
• A mandatory rewrite into one house voice.
• A replacement for an artifact's template, structure authority, or source evidence.
• A full fact-check unless requested. Surface a concrete factual problem encountered during editing instead of silently polishing it into authority.

References

• references/pattern-catalog.md: stable diagnostic IDs and examples.
• references/craft-moves.md: sentence and paragraph repairs.
• references/surface-profiles.md: artifact-specific preservation and worked rewrites.
• references/evidence.md: checked research and its limits.
• scripts/slopscan.pl, scripts/selftest.sh, and references/fixtures/: mechanical checks and regression coverage.