Authorial Judgment

Authorial Judgment

A revision lens for prose that is technically correct, well-structured, and still dead. LLM prose tends to be too smooth, too complete, too linear, too certain, too eager to resolve every thought. This lens makes judgment visible instead of faking imperfection.

Use this as a post-draft pass — after the premise is settled, before the final style pass. Draft first (or take the user's draft), then run the six moves below.

When NOT to use:

• README, API docs, tutorials — reference writing should be complete and linear.
• Specs, changelogs, release notes, status updates — procedural writing should be certain and literal. The moves below would corrupt it.
• Code, commits, tests, config.

The hard gate: real texture or clean prose

Human texture comes from exactly three sources:

1. Real details the author supplied.
2. Real uncertainty in the evidence.
3. Real editorial judgment about what matters.

If none of those exist, keep the prose clean. Do not decorate the absence. Never fabricate uncertainty, lived experience, memory, cognitive bias, or knowledge gaps to sound human. This gate outranks every move below.

The six moves

1. Authorial position, not persona. Write from what the author has actually seen, believes, is skeptical of, or refuses to overclaim — not an invented biography. Weak: "As someone who spent years in boardrooms…" Better: "The boardroom version is simple: everyone agrees in principle, then avoids the one decision that makes the strategy real."

2. Real objection = real friction. Add friction only by handling the pushback a smart reader would actually raise. Ask: what would they reject, think is ignored, or consider too easy? Then answer it briefly. Not random detours.

3. Deliberation only when earned. Show the thought; don't announce it. Kill announced-thought phrases: "let's unpack," "it's worth noting," "as we delve deeper," "the deeper point is," "before we proceed." Use a visible turn only when the claim is complex, contested, or easy to oversimplify.

4. Sharpening re-articulation. Revisit a key idea at most once, and only when the second pass adds a mechanism, a consequence, or a more precise noun. Restating the same idea in prettier words is repetition, not depth.

5. Rhythm follows thought. Vary sentence and paragraph shape to match the argument, never mechanically. If several sentences start the same way or every claim is followed by an example in the same pattern, restructure — lead one sentence with the consequence, another with the constraint; break a long explanation before the reader has to work.

6. AI-inversion refusal. Before finishing, name the move a default LLM would make here — the safe hook, the tidy symmetrical conclusion, the reflexive metaphor, the paragraph included only to sound complete, the overstated claim — and refuse it. Choose the sharper alternative.

Also

• Skip the baseline; name the blind spot. Don't explain what the target reader already knows, and don't use false-authority cues ("as is generally understood," "the discerning reader"). Say "the familiar version is only half the problem" instead.
• Earn the aside. A digression is allowed only if it makes the main point sharper — reveals a mechanism, exposes a tradeoff, or connects to a concrete operating reality.
• No decorative metaphor. An image must clarify the mechanism, not sound nice.

Final review

Before the style pass, ask: Is the argument doing real work? Is the smart reader's objection addressed? Is any uncertainty real rather than performed? Did any re-articulation deepen the idea? Is there any fake memory, persona, or flaw? Could a smart reader replace this with a generic article and lose nothing? If yes, revise.

For failure-mode names and repairs, see references/red-flags.md.