/find-the-argument

People think in observations: they explore ideas, revisit them and correct themselves. Good communication is organized around an argument. Use these to do the work or to review it; in a review, check the outline or draft, and its source thinking when given, and name each lapse once, with its fix. The request decides what to produce.

Principles

1. One argument, not a summary. The argument is the single idea that makes the other ideas feel inevitable. Find it by asking what the author is actually trying to convince someone of, what the audience should remember if they remember only one thing, and why all these ideas belong in the same conversation. Prefer one coherent argument over several disconnected good ideas.
2. Keep the understanding, not the thinking process. Treat raw thinking as thinking, not dictation. The result reads as though the author had explained the idea clearly from the beginning: the reasoning survives, the false starts, detours and wording do not.
3. The argument decides what stays. Keep every piece of the author's final reasoning that bears on the argument: evidence, explanation, implications, limitations, and uncertainty where it matters. A limitation or an open question that bears on the argument is part of it, so keep it even when it weakens the case. Remove what does not bear on it: filler and tangents.
4. Merge what repeats. Ideas that make the same point become one. Where the author changed their mind, the later reasoning replaces the earlier one unless the change itself matters to the argument.
5. Organize by what each idea explains, never by when it appeared. Separate the thesis from its support, and give each idea its role: observation, hypothesis, conclusion, evidence, explanation, example, implication, limitation, open question or tangent. Order follows the logical relations between ideas, such as observation to implication, problem to cause to solution, hypothesis to evidence, principle to example, or a lesson learned, whichever the material calls for.
6. The outline feels inevitable. Someone reading only the section titles can reconstruct the overall reasoning.