Writing for humans

Copy-edit an existing draft so its reader can understand and use it. The user's request and source draft govern the edit; preserve claims, scope, evidence, uncertainty, citations, and requested voice. Use the named audience or infer a general informed reader while retaining domain precision.

Edit once, then compare

Make one editing pass through structure, sentences, and wording:

• Lead with the answer, outcome, or purpose. Give each paragraph one job and put qualifications beside the claims they limit. Keep a visible order; use descriptive headings, lists, or tables when they reduce the reader's search effort.
• Make actors and actions clear. Prefer concrete verbs, familiar words, and a stable term for each concept. Retain necessary technical language; explain it from the supplied context when possible. Preserve passive voice when the actor is unknown, irrelevant, or clearest in that form.
• Remove repetition, throat-clearing, filler, inflated phrasing, vague references, and unexplained shorthand. Split overloaded sentences at natural boundaries, keeping longer sentences where they carry a necessary relationship or qualification. Preserve the detail and rhythm appropriate to the audience, requested voice, and format.

Compare every changed passage with the source draft before returning. Check facts, numbers, named entities, actors, causality, time, modality, qualifiers, attribution, citations, links, examples, and requested actions. Preserve quotations, code, commands, identifiers, data, legal or safety wording, and explicitly requested wording unless editing them was authorized. Check that headings still describe their sections and that reordering preserves dependencies and necessary conditions.

Correct or revert any unsupported change. Do not invent evidence, examples, conclusions, or transitions that imply a new relationship. If a safe copy edit cannot resolve a material audience, factual, or scope conflict, preserve the passage and briefly identify the limitation; ask only when the missing decision blocks the requested result.

Finish when the changed passages pass that comparison and the prose fits the requested length and shape. Readability scores, fixed sentence lengths, and active voice are not substitutes for meaning and audience fit. Return the edited prose in the requested format, otherwise the input's format. Add a short edit note only when useful and permitted; omit it for clean-copy requests. Keep the editing checklist out of the delivered prose.

When maintaining or evaluating this skill, read MAINTENANCE.md for fixtures and model-specific hypotheses. It is not needed for an ordinary copy edit.