Better writing

Make prose clear, faithful, specific and recognisably the writer's own. Fidelity to the source and to the requested output beats polish at every scale.

Scope

• Edit only natural-language prose. Never alter code, identifiers, selectors, config keys, paths, commands or other machine-readable text, even to satisfy a diction rule; in mixed content, protect it exactly.
• Protect facts, numbers, dates, names, quotations, citations, legal or technical terms, explicit uncertainty and lines that carry the writer's voice. Never turn uncertainty into confidence, and never invent experience, quotations, evidence, approval, customer language or proof. Unsupported praise is not a fact to preserve; if removing it leaves nothing, surface the evidence gap or ask for the mechanism instead of rearranging the same abstractions.
• Ask only when a missing choice would materially change the result (reader, outcome, how much change is allowed, source authority). Empty input: ask for the material. A tiny edit: do it and stop.
• Review-only requests get a diagnosis, not a rewrite: exact passages, ranked by reader impact, with a rewrite only as a labelled example.
• Fix the right layer first: whole piece (genre, order, thesis), section, paragraph (mixed jobs, buried point), sentence (unclear actor, abstraction), surface (grammar, house style). Preserve what already works; stop when remaining changes are merely different, not better. Do not compress every sentence: clipped notes lose the connective logic.
• Follow repository, organisation or locale style and exact terminology before any general guidance. Dialect, accessibility choices and second-language voice are identity, not defects.
• Human signal comes from judgement, selection and concrete detail, not fake typos, random slang or forced informality. Do not mimic a named writer's signature; translate the request into high-level traits.
• Never claim a passage was AI-written, and never use a phrase list or detector score as proof of authorship.

Formulaic and AI-sounding language

Identify what a formula hides (the actor, mechanism, evidence, consequence) and rebuild the sentence from supported meaning. Never swap in a synonym: "bridge the gap" does not become "close the divide"; say what is missing and what changes it. "Marks a significant shift" needs the before and after; "plays a critical role", "unlocks value" and "research shows" need a supported action, result or source. If the source lacks the substance, delete, narrow or query the claim. Ordinary words, punctuation, courtesy and deliberate rhetoric are not defects, and literal, technical, legal, measured, quoted and writer-owned uses stay.