natural-center-extraction
Natural Center Extraction
Every sufficiently long artifact has a passage where its energies converge — the block a reader quotes, a trailer cuts to, an editor pulls. This skill finds that block by scoring rather than vibes, and returns it verbatim with the evidence for why it wins.
Why this exists
Excerpt selection is usually done by skimming, which favors openings and recency. Algorithmic scoring over all contiguous candidates surfaces centers that skimming misses — the buried turn in hour two of a transcript, the paragraph where argument and feeling finally coincide. The output feeds distribution work (shorts, pull-quotes, abstracts) with a defensible selection rather than a taste call.
The five axes
| Axis | What it measures | High-scoring signals |
|---|---|---|
| pathos | felt intensity | stakes made personal; vulnerability; register shifts; concrete sensory detail |
| logos | argumentative force | a claim completed in-block (setup → turn → consequence); evidence meeting assertion |
| ethos | voice authority | the speaker most distinctly themselves; earned credibility on display; coinages dense |
| kairos | timeliness/pivot | the moment the piece turns; before/after asymmetry; decision points; reversals |
| density | compression | ideas-per-sentence; no warm-up or wind-down inside the block; every line load-bearing |
Each axis scored 0–10 per candidate block. Axes are scored independently then combined — a block must not be pre-selected because one axis shouts.