Clear, Natural English Editing
Improve the reader's understanding, not a detector score. A good reference can have repeated terminology, regular tables, definitions and no anecdote. Keep the user's intended voice and the destination's format.
Facts Are Not Style Material
- Preserve supplied numbers, units, dates, versions, names, citations, negation, uncertainty and claim scope. Do not silently update a historical date.
- Never invent a count, quote, interview, personal experience, experiment, failure, comparison or source to make prose more vivid.
- Add specificity only when the supporting evidence supplies it. If no measurement exists, retain uncertainty or remove an unsupported claim. An unsupplied number is not an improvement over a vague quantity.
- Label illustrative scenarios as hypothetical. Do not present them as a real case study or treat their invented values as proof of a product claim.
- Preserve identifiers, executable code and technical obligations. Words such as may, must, can and will are not interchangeable style alternatives.
- Reuse provided facts without asking the user to repeat them. Research a material factual gap when research is in scope; otherwise identify the gap without manufacturing an answer or blocking supported edits.
Match the Genre
| Genre | Useful editing | Avoid forcing |
|---|---|---|
| technical reference | exact terms, clear conditions, scannable structure | slang, story openings, rhetorical questions, sales CTA |
| explanation/tutorial | prerequisites and action/result sequence | an untested command described as verified |
| analysis | separate observation, inference and limits | stronger causal claims than the evidence supports |
| personal narrative | the author's supplied experiences and voice | invented first-person testimony |
| marketing | a supported benefit and relevant next action | fabricated testimonials, percentages or guarantees |
Contractions, fragments, humour, analogies and direct address are options, not quotas. Use them when they fit the audience and improve comprehension. Parallel lists and consistent terminology can be desirable in documentation.
Editing Procedure
- Identify the reader's task, genre, source material and protected facts from the existing request and draft. Do not add an unnecessary intake questionnaire.
- Remove empty intensifiers and duplicated ideas. Use direct verbs when meaning is preserved; keep connectors that express real causality or contrast.
- Clarify who acts, on what, under which conditions and with what result. Do not supply a result that the source does not establish.
- Fix awkward rhythm where it hinders reading. Do not maximize variation, enforce a paragraph pattern or replace terms to appear less predictable.
- Compare input and output for semantic changes. Check quantities with their units, denominator, time frame and uncertainty, not just the numeral.
- Return the edited text and any necessary factual caveat. Once the edit is sufficient, continue the remaining requested publication workflow rather than starting another stylistic pass automatically.
Examples: Same Facts, Clearer Prose
| Supplied text | Faithful edit |
|---|---|
| In order to load the file, the user must select Open. | To load the file, select Open. |
| The tool may reduce processing time; no benchmark is available. | The tool may save processing time, but no benchmark is available. |
| Some testers reported failures. The sample size was not recorded. | Some testers reported failures; the sample size was not recorded. |
| On 2026-09-01, 12 of 40 runs failed with version 2.1. | With version 2.1, 12 of 40 runs failed on 2026-09-01. |
These are editing fixtures, not results from a deployed product. Unknown sample size stays unknown; a date, denominator and version do not disappear for fluency.
Verification
- Every changed factual assertion still maps to the supplied material or a source actually checked for this task.
- Conditions, uncertainty, negatives, numbers, units, dates, versions and code are preserved unless an evidence-backed factual correction was requested.
- The result helps its intended reader without an unrequested genre change.
- No invented testimony or detector-evasion claim was added.
A no-change verdict is valid for an already clear passage. Do not add numbers, questions, opinions, deliberate errors or fake admissions to satisfy a score.
Gotchas
- Detector score as evidence: it establishes neither authorship nor factual accuracy. Do not promise an undetectable edit.
- Replacing every vague quantity: guessing a plausible percentage fabricates evidence when the sample size is unknown.
- Forced informality: slang can make a reference harder to understand, particularly for readers using English as an additional language.
- Synonym churn: repeating a technical term is safer than creating a false distinction through alternate names.
- Example contamination: a skill example is not an event that happened to the user or author.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Check | Correction |
|---|---|---|
| polished but unsupported claim | source scope and conditions | restore supported meaning or remove the claim |
| bureaucratic phrasing | action and actor | use a direct sentence without changing obligations |
| repetitive text | repeated meaning versus necessary terms | cut redundancy, keep precise terminology |
| reference sounds like an advertisement | requested genre | remove promotion and invented narrative |
| detector flags the passage | actual writing and detector limitations | repair evidenced defects, not a guessed authorship score |
Sources and Maintenance
Reviewed 2026-09-06. Owner: the existing writing-skill maintainers. Change through canonical Git, focused before/after fixtures, independent review and the supported installer; retain the prior revision and installation backup for rollback. Refresh sources when guidance changes or a factual/genre regression is observed, not by automatically rewriting working prose on a schedule.
- Developer documentation voice and tone, updated 2026-05-27: clarity and audience matter more than forced informality.
- GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers, revised 2023-07-10: limitations of the evaluated detectors, not a test of every current detector or a guarantee about any individual passage.
- Excess vocabulary in biomedical publications, revised 2025-07-03: corpus-level biomedical analysis, not an individual-author test or a prescriptive word blacklist.
