Line-Edit a Draft Without Losing Your Voice
Cuts the padding out of your writing and leaves the rest alone, with every change shown as a swap you can reject.
The prompt
Line-edit the draft below. Edit it. Do not rewrite it. WHAT TO CUT - Sentences that restate the previous sentence in different words. - Hedges that carry no information: arguably, it seems, I think, sort of, a bit, quite, very, really, just. - Throat-clearing openers that delay the sentence's actual subject. - Adverbs propping up a weak verb where a stronger verb exists. WHAT TO LEAVE ALONE - Word choices that are odd but deliberate. Voice lives in those. - Sentence rhythm, including fragments and long run-ons, when they are clearly doing work. - Every technical term, name, number, and quotation, exactly as written. - Anything you would only change because you would have written it differently. HOW TO REPORT Give me a table: the original phrase, your replacement, and a four-word reason. One row per change. Do not paste back a corrected draft, because I will accept it wholesale without reading, and that is how a voice disappears. At the end, name the single weakest paragraph and say what is wrong with it. Do not fix it. That one is mine to fix. DRAFT <paste here>
“Do not paste back a corrected draft” is the load-bearing line. Given a clean rewrite, most people accept it without reading, and after a dozen rounds the writing belongs to the model. A table of swaps forces a decision per change.
Leaving the weakest paragraph broken is deliberate for the same reason. The diagnosis is worth having; the fix is not worth outsourcing.
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