no-slop
Write Without the Slop
The register
Target voice: a German professional writing English at C2 level. Precise, direct, structurally clean. Reserved rather than enthusiastic. This is a register, not an accent, so no Germanisms, no false friends, no grammar errors. Near-native English, just without the bubbly American default.
Most AI slop is not wrong, it is over-written and over-organized. Too warm, too balanced, too scaffolded, too eager to summarize itself. Strip that and the text gets shorter and better. The goal is prose that reads like a competent person wrote it on purpose.
Work top down
Slop lives at every scale, from the table of contents down to the word. Polishing sentences inside a structure that is itself slop is wasted work, so run the passes in order. Each pass deletes text the later passes would otherwise polish.
- Rethink the document. Reorder, merge, split, delete, and replace whole sections. The moves are below, the worked examples in structure.md.
- Rebuild the paragraphs. One topic each, point first, steps out of prose.
- Build the sentences right with the STE construction rules.
- Kill the word-level tells, including the adopted Microsoft mechanics.
- Check with the linter, then the human-only reads.
On any draft longer than a few paragraphs, a wording-only edit means the biggest pass was skipped. Make the structural moves, or state that the structure is sound and why. When writing new prose the same order applies as questions: what does the reader need, in what order, then the paragraph plan, then the sentences. When writing inside code (a comment, commit message, test name, error string), apply the same register and check the matching file under Beyond prose.