skills/human-prose/references/final-check.md

# Final check for prose and fiction

Use this after a substantial edit or draft. Do not report the checklist unless the user asks.

## Pre-return fiction quality gate

- Treat the first composed version of generated or substantially rewritten fiction as provisional working prose. Complete this gate and repair the same draft before returning any fiction text.
- Inspect every run of adjacent paragraphs. If several consecutive paragraphs contain only one sentence, verify that each break has an independent reason such as a speaker change, focus shift, action turn, thought shift, time or location change, intentional emphasis, or required form. Recombine unsupported breaks around coherent scene units.
- Inspect every sequence that reduces to `action -> perception -> result -> reaction` or a similar semantic chain. If the beats have been distributed sentence by sentence, rebuild the sequence through causality, simultaneity, subordination, and POV attention.
- Do not waive the cadence check for tense, visual, action-heavy, emotional, or fast-paced scenes. Preserve fragmented cadence only when the specific moment earns it, and restore connected prose afterward.
- Confirm that developed multi-sentence paragraphs substantially outnumber isolated one-sentence paragraphs in ordinary narrative prose. Treat this as a distributional warning rather than a quota, preserve breaks required by speaker changes or requested form, and never merge unrelated scene units merely to improve the count.
- Check syntactic hierarchy. Supporting circumstances, perceptions, qualifications, and consequences should not automatically receive the same grammatical weight as primary actions. Do not repair flatness by creating unwieldy sentences, dangling modifiers, conjunction chains, or repetitive trailing `-ing` clauses.
- Re-run the structural narrative, paragraph cadence, dialogue, continuity, and sentence checks below on the repaired draft.
- Return only the post-audit version unless the user explicitly requested raw working prose, fragments, beat notes, or another intentionally fragmented form.

## Voice and meaning

- Did the revision preserve the writer's facts, opinions, intended uncertainty, POV, tense, and distinctive diction?
- Did any "cleanup" make a strong line safer, flatter, or more generic?
- Did the edit invent a claim, source, motive, causal connection, or sensory detail?

## Structural narrative pass

- Inspect every paragraph for authorial-management leakage. Delete sentences whose real function is explaining why the story has not introduced another ability, asked another question, pursued another mystery, repeated another test, or violated another prompt restriction.
- Check negative statements about what a character did not perceive, ask, decide, understand, or do. Keep them when expectation, refusal, absence, or restraint matters inside the scene. Remove them when they merely manage reader expectations or document compliance with an outline.
- For every repeated phenomenon, ask whether the new occurrence changes consequence, knowledge, relationship, plan, risk, limits, reliability, contrast, or immediate circumstances. If none changes, compress or remove the repetition.
- During high-intensity passages, identify every sentence that expresses the same central fact. Keep the strongest formulation and any additional beat that genuinely changes the situation, perception, or response.
- For every sequence of physical actions, ask whether the reader needs each intermediate movement. If several steps exist only because a body would technically have to perform them, compress the sequence around its intention. Preserve procedure that carries suspense, obstacle, discovery, hesitation, limitation, choice, ritual, expertise, concealment, or comedy.
- Group sensory evidence by its scene purpose. Choose the strongest detail or combine related evidence unless accumulation itself creates atmosphere, voice, disorientation, or another distinct effect.
- After every striking event, inspect the next sentence for a micro-verdict or restatement. If the event already communicates the meaning, delete the explanation. Keep an interpretation that specifically changes belief, action, or voice.
- In dialogue, identify when each speaker has enough information to adopt a position. After that point, further questions should add consequential information or perform a dramatic function; otherwise move toward decision, desire, resistance, or action.
- Delete narration that announces the end of interview mode. Let the shift appear through behavior or speech.
- Confirm that structural repairs did not invent replacement actions, motives, dialogue, decisions, causal links, or sensory facts.

## Structure and rhetoric

- Look for repeated corrective contrasts, triplets, faux-insight setups, and repeated sentence shapes.
- Remove significance inflation that is not supported by a concrete consequence or source.
- Remove redundant recaps and fake-profound final lines.
- Confirm that headings, bullets, bolding, and tables exist because the material needs them.

## Paragraph cadence

- Apply this check across genres, POVs, tenses, narrators, and scene types. Inspect action, introspection, description, memory, dialogue-adjacent narration, memoir, and narrative nonfiction for the same one-beat-per-sentence architecture; do not treat named-character action as the only form of the defect.
- Audit every paragraph and adjacent one-sentence paragraphs by narrative function, not only sentence length. Reduce each sentence to its beat, such as action, result, reaction, perception, or interpretation, and check whether one continuous moment has been needlessly split into a sentence-by-sentence chain.
- Do not let one longer sentence interrupting several short ones clear the sequence. Mixed short and medium-length sentences can still have severe staccato cadence when each sentence carries one isolated semantic beat.
- Use four or more consecutive sentences or lines at roughly eight to ten words or fewer as a strong warning signal, not a required threshold. Also flag repeated subject-verb openings, one-detail-per-sentence fragmentation, and action-perception-interpretation-reaction chains that read like screenplay beats.
- When the cadence is defective, replace the paragraph architecture. Recombine related beats according to simultaneity, cause, emphasis, and POV; embed subordinate perceptions, group related details, and remove unnecessary beats instead of preserving the original sentence boundaries.
- Confirm that the rewrite expresses relationships among the beats rather than simply replacing periods with conjunctions or commas.
- Preserve concentrated fragments or short-sentence bursts only when panic, impact, interruption, shock, comic timing, or established voice clearly motivates them.
- After an intentional burst, confirm that the next paragraph restores a natural range of sentence lengths. Do not let the rest of the scene remain trapped in the same clipped rhythm.

## Sentence pass

- No em dashes.
- Check trailing `-ing` clauses for superficial analysis.
- Check fake-strong verbs and unnecessary copula avoidance.
- Check vague `this`, `that`, `it`, `thing`, `something`, and abstract filler.
- Check clusters of watchlist vocabulary. Do not blindly replace isolated words.

## Dialogue and scene pass

- No sustained floating back-and-forth unless the user explicitly wants that presentation.
- Ground dialogue without attaching a gesture to every line.
- Break ping-pong exchanges when character agendas would naturally make the conversation less orderly.
- Do not require every reply to answer every question fully or in order. Allow partial answers, premise rejection, anticipation, redirection, evasion, interruption, and action when they fit the speaker and scene.
- Preserve structured questioning when formal examination, interrogation, technical diagnosis, power, denial, reassurance, delay, obsession, or persuasion gives the questions dramatic purpose.
- Make sure confrontations and action scenes have dialogue where people would realistically speak.
- Re-read every question and confirm the question mark is present.
- Check that each speaker sounds like that character rather than like the previous speaker.

## Continuity

- Can every body and object physically do what the prose says from its current location?
- Does time of day and lighting remain consistent?
- Does age and timeline math still work?
- Do plans, promises, injuries, possessions, knowledge, and prior agreements remain consistent with established material?

## Scope

Do not turn a local edit into an unsolicited whole-document rewrite. If only one passage changed, audit that passage and enough surrounding context to protect continuity.