Passive voice audit: detect be-participle/get/concealed passives, evaluate agent suppression justification, rewrite flagged instances.
Passive voice suppresses the agent: who did what becomes invisible. This is appropriate when the agent is unknown or irrelevant ("The package was deli...
Rhetorical editing: anaphora, isocolon, tricolon applied to prose with before/after analysis.
Parallel structure is the single most reliable technique for making prose memorable. It exploits the brain's pattern-recognition system: when a reader...
Seven editing heuristics: nominalization, expletives, preposition cascades, weak verbs, redundancy, hedges, jargon.
Every editor develops intuition for what makes prose weak. This framework codifies that intuition into seven heuristics that catch 90% of readability ...
Metaphor audit: extract source-to-target mappings, check consistency and fidelity, detect mixed metaphors.
Metaphors are structural models mapping one domain (source) onto another (target). When a writer calls software a 'blueprint,' they invite the reader ...
Reverse outline: extract paragraph skeleton, diagnose duplicate/gap/stray/order issues, propose restructured order.
Every piece of writing has a hidden structure. A reverse outline extracts it sentence by sentence, revealing whether the argument flows logically or j...
Argument analysis: claim, evidence, warrant (4 categories), rebuttal, qualifier, logical bridge detection.
Most weak arguments fail not because the claim is wrong, but because the evidence does not actually support the claim. The gap between evidence and co...
Prose rhythm analysis: length distribution, opening patterns, stressed positions, cacophony detection, rewrite.
Prose rhythm is invisible to most readers but felt by all. Short sentences create urgency. Long sentences create flow. Mixing them creates a cadence t...
Genre adaptation: academic→blog, post-mortem→board report, Twitter→docs, sales→engineering spec.
Adapt the provided text from one genre to another while preserving every fact, argument, and emotional beat. Genre is not just vocabulary—it changes p...
Seven hooks by cognitive bias: gap, contrast, authority, FOMO, loss aversion, identification, pattern interrupt.
The first line determines whether the rest is read. Readers decide within 1.5 seconds. Each hook targets a different cognitive mechanism. Write 7 hoo...
Multi-audience tone calibration: executive, technical, novice, public, legal—with implicit audience analysis.
Transform the provided message for 5 distinct audiences while preserving 100% informational content. Different audiences trust different argument type...
Two-pass editing: compress 50% preserving all claims, expand key paragraph with analogy and example.
Apply two opposing editing passes to the provided text. The goal is to reveal its structural DNA—what it relies on, what it wastes, and what it leaves...
Technical docs: TypeScript signature, behavior spec, edge cases table, worked example, error scenarios.
Write reference documentation for the described endpoint. Good docs teach the mental model so readers can debug their own mistakes. 1. SIGNATURE with...