academic-prose-auditlisted

# Academic Prose Audit This skill fixes two distinct defects that get confused with each other. **Compression** is the serious one. The prose is accurate but too much is left for the reader to reconstruct: the actor is buried in a nominalisation, the middle term of an argument is missing, a citation stands where a sentence of reasoning should be. The reader can follow it only by doing work the writer should have done. **Mechanical register** is the cosmetic one. Em dashes, uniform sentence length, connective filler, and the vocabulary that marks text as machine-produced. Compression is the priority. A paragraph can be free of every AI tell and still be unreadable because its reasoning is elided. ## What this skill must not do The generic "humaniser" tools in circulation are built for blog and marketing copy, and applying them to a law paper degrades it. Protect the following, which those tools attack: **Hedging that reflects genuine doctrinal uncertainty stays.** "The position is unsettled" is accurate, not weak. Where the law genuinely admits of two readings, saying so is the honest move. Cut hedging only where it is decorative — stacked modals cancelling each other, or qualification attached to a proposition that is not in fact doubtful. **Formal register stays.** No contractions. No deliberate sentence fragments in body prose. No first-person plural exhortation. No manufactured "natural disfluency". The target is prose that reads as though a careful academic wrote