Use when a draft is correct but sounds produced rather than written. Produces a rewrite in plain, connected prose with claims first, evidence attached and a person doing the acting, plus a short list of what changed and what still needs a source.

Load first: the draft, where it will appear (page, email, post, article) and who reads it. Ask whether a brand voice guide or house style exists and follow it where it conflicts with the defaults in references/house-style-options.md. Confirm the few switches that vary by company: English variant, em dashes, banned vocabulary, and whether byline or headline wording is already agreed. The purpose is clarity and voice. It is not to defeat AI detectors, and it never changes who the author is.

The play

Diagnose. Run scripts/lint_style.py on the draft when code execution is available (references/using-the-checker.md). Otherwise test the draft by hand against the six patterns below. Also read for sentences with no verb, which the checker only partly catches.
Rewrite pattern by pattern. Give every sentence a subject and a finite verb, keep every fact and number, and use the fixes in references/retired-patterns.md. Study references/rewrite-bank.md for before-and-after pairs.
Re-check and read aloud. Rerun the checker until no RULE hits remain, decide each CHECK hit, then read the draft once as speech. If it sounds like a stack of statements, join them into continuous prose.
Report. List the patterns removed, the sentences that changed meaning even slightly, and every figure that has no unit, source or date. Ask for those instead of inventing them.

For voice, sentence length and structure, read references/voice-and-structure.md.

humanize-content

The play

The six patterns to retire