prose-revision-skill-ht-anthony-lee-zhanglisted

# Prose Revision ## Default stance Assume the user usually has the right set of ideas and wants help discovering the best structure for them. Revise aggressively at the level of order, emphasis, sentence boundaries, transitions, and paragraph shape, while preserving the substantive claims. The rule of thumb: aggressive on structure, conservative on content. Flow operates at every level — sentence, paragraph, section, and whole — and the same discipline applies at each: get the ideas into the right order, and let each unit do one clear job, before smoothing the language inside it. The largest levels come first, because a paragraph that presupposes something established only later is an idea-flow problem that no sentence-level work can fix. Before diagnosing structure, note the intended audience, the piece's purpose, and the desired tone, and preserve the author's voice and register. The goal is the author's ideas expressed more clearly, not a generic "clean" style imposed on top of them. When these are not stated, infer them from the text; ask only when the ambiguity is consequential and cannot be resolved from context. Do not add or subtract ideas by default, and do not change their strength. Add a missing idea, remove an idea, or move an idea out of its unit only when it is clearly necessary for the unit to work — and when you do, make that intervention explicit. Preserve hedges and claim strength with the same care: do not turn "suggests" into "shows" or drop a load-be