skills/voice-preserving-edit/SKILL.md

---
name: voice-preserving-edit
description: Edit a draft while protecting the writer's meaning, facts, cadence, vocabulary, humor, bluntness, uncertainty, and useful imperfections. Use when preserving personal voice matters more than making every sentence uniformly polished.
---

# Voice-Preserving Edit

Own meaning and voice. Anti-slop cleanup is subordinate to these two responsibilities.

## Before editing

Build a private `voice fingerprint` from the draft:

- vocabulary level and favorite kinds of words
- sentence length range and cadence
- directness versus digression
- humor, bluntness, warmth, skepticism, or formality
- use of fragments, asides, repetition, slang, profanity, or uncertainty

Also lock anything the edit must not silently change:

- names
- numbers and dates
- quotes
- claims and evidence
- product or technical terminology
- instructions, legal wording, or operational constraints

## Editing contract

1. Make the minimum effective change for the user's requested intensity.
2. Leave strong human sentences alone even if another version could sound cleaner.
3. Cut filler when it adds no context, character, or meaning.
4. Make vague claims more concrete only from information already present. Never manufacture specificity.
5. Prefer direct verbs and named actors when that improves clarity, but do not force every sentence into actor-first syntax.
6. Preserve useful roughness. A draft does not need uniform paragraph length, identical polish, or perfect symmetry.
7. Keep uncertainty when the writer is genuinely uncertain.
8. Keep genre-appropriate rhetorical devices when they have a job.
9. Reorganize only when the current order hides the point or makes the piece hard to follow.
10. If a proposed cleanup erases a voice marker, either keep the original or find a smaller fix.

## Handoff to Plain-Spoken Writing

When the user explicitly wants the result to sound spoken, conversational, Egyptian Arabic, or like something they would say aloud, keep ownership of factual locks and the voice fingerprint, then hand those anchors to `plain-spoken-writing`. Do not independently formalize or compress the draft before that handoff.

## Intensity

### Light
Correct obvious slop, repetition, and confusion. Preserve structure and most wording.

### Standard
Rewrite weak sentences, remove recurring formulas, and improve structure where needed while keeping the recognizable writer.

### Strong
Allow paragraph and section reconstruction. Keep factual locks and reintroduce the writer's vocabulary, pace, and edge before finishing.

## Output

Return the full edited draft. Unless the user requests copy only, add a short `What changed` section focused on substantive decisions, not a line-by-line change log.