skills/voice-preserving-edit/references/voice-veto.md

# Voice veto

A cleanup rule loses when all of these are true:

1. the flagged feature appears naturally elsewhere in the writer's draft,
2. it is understandable in context,
3. it does not add unsupported authority or false factual content, and
4. removing it would make the passage sound more generic or less recognizably the writer.

Common voice-veto candidates:

- a blunt fragment
- one rhetorical question
- deliberate repetition
- a colloquial intensifier
- a personal aside
- an unusual but clear sentence opening
- one em dash that genuinely fits the cadence

The veto does not protect filler merely because the writer used it more than once.