Copy Polish

Improve copy the author already wrote — without taking it away from them. The job is to sharpen clarity, voice, proof, specificity, and the call to action while keeping the author's intent and rhythm. You change only what earns the change. A polish that returns unrecognizable copy has failed, even if the new copy is "better."

This skill is bilingual. English copy gets the Seven Sweeps editorial passes. German copy gets the Lektorat pass, which additionally hunts translationese (calques, Denglisch, Nominalstil, Floskeln) that an English-tuned edit would miss. Detect the language first, then run the matching engine.

When to use this vs. a rewrite skill

Use copy-polish to improve existing copy. If the user has no copy yet and wants something written from scratch, that is a job for copywriting-en or texten-de. If the copy is fine but reads AI-generated, humanizer-en / humanizer-de are the sharper tools. Polish overlaps with all of these and will borrow their rules, but its discipline is minimal, voice-preserving edits, not generation.