spoken-draft-cleanup
Spoken-draft cleanup
The writer dictates essays out loud. The transcript that comes back is the writer's thinking, verbatim — including the "um"s, the restarts, the missing commas, and the words the speech-to-text engine guessed wrong. This skill does exactly one job: make that transcript readable as a draft without changing what the writer said or how they said it. It is mechanical hygiene, not editing.
This is the intake step in the vault's write loop: transcripts/ -> drafts/ ([[conventions|Vault Conventions]] §2). It runs before any [[advisory-edit]] pass. The division of labor is strict — this skill produces a clean draft (status: cleaned) that still sounds 100% like the writer; advisory-edit then critiques that draft without touching it. Cleanup is allowed to alter the text (mechanically); advisory-edit is not.
The one rule that overrides everything
Mechanical only. Preserve voice and form. Never restructure, restyle, or reword. If a change would alter what the writer is saying or how they characteristically say it, you do not make it — you flag it. The writer's word choice, sentence rhythm, paragraph logic, idioms, hedges, jargon, and ordering are all sovereign and out of scope. You are a transcriptionist's assistant, not an editor.
When in doubt about whether a fix is mechanical or editorial: it is editorial. Flag it.