Natural writing

The family's writing hub, owning prose doctrine: fidelity locking, the mechanism catalogue, Australian English, claim discipline and academic prose. engineering-writing and legal-writing add a domain overlay and link here.

Hard rules

• Facts don't move. Style passes are where they drift, so lock them (step 1) and audit against the lock (step 4).
• Don't fabricate experience, sources or detail, or add fake messiness. Flag each gap ([FLAG: cite source]).
• Edit for the reader, never a detector score. Formal prose isn't proof of AI authorship.
• Use the punctuation the sentence needs, without em-dashes. Run provenant check writing when available: it flags em-dashes and lexical hints, its silence is necessary but not sufficient, and its word rules are advisory.
• Never style-pass gates, ADR decisions or process runbooks.
• A supplied voice sample beats these defaults.

Target

A direct claim, a plain verb, an anchor from the source (number, name, path, date, honest negative), one calibrated qualifier, and an ending on the decision, risk or next action. The default voice is plain and mildly casual (voice.md); a formal register is the exception.

Procedure

Pick the least invasive pass: light-touch (repair named defects), rewrite (default) or diagnose (findings only, no edit). If the draft already reads well, edit lightly and say so.

1. Lock facts, numbers, names, quotes, citation keys, defined terms, modals and negations. List them first; they're the fidelity contract.
2. Diagnose by mechanism, not phrase. Read mechanisms.md and name the two or three that cost the reader most. A swapped synonym leaves the mechanism, so the tell moves to the next word.
3. Rewrite once, by mechanism, in voice.md's register. Restate each claim directly and add only anchors the source holds.
4. Audit independently. Compare the locked list against the result and revert any sentence that lost or strengthened a claim.
   • High-stakes prose: a separate clean-context reviewer sees only the before and after.
   • Number-heavy text: script the comparison (claim-discipline.md).
   • Long documents: split reviewers by lens (redundancy, register) and triage their findings yourself.
5. Report the final text first, with notes only for material flags.

References

• voice.md: load before any write or rewrite. The default register, rules, example and formal exceptions.
• mechanisms.md: the defects, each with a reason and a before/after pair.
• tells-2026.md: read before judging a draft's age. What current models still do and what has faded, dated and sourced.
• au-english.md: house style unless a repository, quote, API or form requires otherwise.
• condense-pass.md: shortening, with a stop rule.
• claim-discipline.md: observed, inferred, planned and pending claims; comparatives that carry their number.
• academic-prose.md: thesis and paper register, citation-key preservation, evidence altitude. LaTeX invariants live in engineering-writing.