Reverse Outline

name: reverse-outline description: >- Decompose an article into its argument structure, persist that structure as HTML-comment markers in the text, and rank every paragraph and section by what the argument loses if it is cut. RST nuclearity at paragraph grain run as a reverse outline: one line per paragraph saying what it does for which other paragraph, then a deletion sheet ordered by distance from the point. Also re-checks each paragraph against its own marker after a rewrite pass, which is how compression damage becomes visible. Never rewrites prose. Triggers: reverse outline, decompose the argument, what can I cut, rank paragraphs, rst map, does this section earn its place, erosion check. argument-hint: 'Path to the markdown article, plus one of: annotate | rank | audit | strip'

reverse-outline

Answers one question the other instruments cannot: what does this section say that an earlier one did not?

Every existing tool works on a unit smaller than the problem. tighten-style tightens sentences. critic-panel nominates one paragraph per critic. The polemic blueprint budgets one structure in one form. AI-drafted text goes on at the section as readily as at the sentence, and nothing asks a section to justify its existence.

This skill labels the argument, then ranks by what deletion would cost. The author cuts from the bottom. No prose is written, at any point, which is why it can run after the terminal stage that forbids a generative pass.

Method

Three published pieces, one procedure.

• Reverse outlining (writing-centre practice; the Waterloo handout) is the procedure: write one sentence per paragraph saying what it does, then read the sentences against the thesis and look for repetition, drift, and gaps. Done by hand it works and nobody does it, because it is tedious at article length and has to be redone after every revision.
• Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson 1988) is the labelling. Spans join in pairs: a nucleus the author's purpose depends on, and a satellite supporting it. The definitional test is deletion — remove a satellite and the text still makes its point; remove a nucleus and it does not. RST's relation set is closed and each relation states its intended effect on the reader, which is exactly the "why is this paragraph here" line a reverse outline asks for.
• Marcu (1997) is the ranking: units ordered by nuclearity depth match what human summarizers keep. Read backwards, that is a deletion order.

See references/relations.md for the relation set, the definitions, and the cut order.

What this adds to the methods

Three additions, and each one is load-bearing.

1. Paragraph grain, not clause. RST parsers work on elementary discourse units, roughly clauses. The paragraph is the unit an author actually cuts, so it is the unit labelled.
2. Markers persisted in the text. The structure is written into the article as HTML comments, so it survives every rewrite pass and can be re-checked after each one. A reverse outline in a separate file is stale the moment the author edits, which is the reason the hand method does not survive contact with revision.
3. A cut order among satellites at equal depth. Marcu ranks by depth alone. The order in relations.md breaks those ties, derived from the relation definitions — and it is flagged there as the skill's one judgment call.

Marker grammar

One comment line per unit: immediately above each paragraph, and immediately below each heading — a marker above a heading sits at the end of the previous section and reads as though it belongs there.

<!-- rst: <relation>[ -> <n>] | <one line: what it does for its target> -->

• relation — from the closed set in references/relations.md: nucleus; presentational (evidence, justify, concession, antithesis, motivation, preparation, background, restatement, summary); subject-matter (elaboration, interpretation, evaluation, circumstance, purpose, solutionhood); multinuclear (contrast, sequence, list, joint); plus split when no single function can be stated.
• -> n — the 1-indexed paragraph within the section this satellite attaches to. Omitted means the section nucleus. Depth is the number of hops to that nucleus, computed rather than stored.
• On a heading — the same grammar, on the line below the heading, gives the section's relation to the thesis: line in front matter.
• Exactly one nucleus per section.

---
title: Strategy Theatre
thesis: a document that cannot say what, for whom, and for how much is not a strategy, and the machine makes such documents free
---

## The Three Questions
<!-- rst: evidence | the three blanks every lender already enforces -->

<!-- rst: nucleus | a strategy answers what / who pays / how much -->
The difference between a real strategy and a document that looks like one…

<!-- rst: evidence | a bank's loan form enforces the same three blanks daily -->
A plumber financing a second truck…

<!-- rst: elaboration -> 2 | unpacks the loan-form analogy -->
The form has no box for a diagram…

<!-- rst: restatement | says the three questions again -->
These questions are boring, which is the point.

Why comments, and why they survive

The markers ride rails that already exist. <!-- lock --> has travelled the whole pipeline as a comment since GH-57. md_paragraphs.parse classifies comment lines as non-prose and, since GH-86, does so by content and state rather than by how a line starts. The replacement drivers splice prose line ranges only, so a marker line is never inside a range a rewrite can touch. critic-panel/scripts/prepare_copy.py already drops comments before a critic reads.

Nothing new had to be built to make the structure persist, which is the whole argument for putting it in comments.

Runs

annotate <article.md>

Model run. A fresh-context agent reads the article and its thesis: line — proposing one if absent, for the author to confirm, since that is a decision about direction rather than prose — and emits one marker per heading and paragraph. rst_markers.py validates the tree before writing: one nucleus per section, every -> n target present, no cycles, every prose paragraph labelled. Locked spans are never annotated inside.

A tree that fails validation goes back to the agent with the violation named. Hand-repairing it would produce a tree nobody can reproduce.

rank <article.md>

Deterministic from the markers alone. No model call. Writes <stem>.outline.md with four sections:

1. The reverse outline — the one-liners in document order. Read together they should tell the article's story; where they do not, the article does not either.

2. Deletion candidates — joint first, since a paragraph the argument never reaches beats a distant one that at least supports something; then by depth descending, then by cut order. Sections ranked against the thesis. Every row carries its paragraph number.

   Beneath the table, runs that can be cut whole: a contrast, sequence or list group whose every member is otherwise deletable, ranked by its best member and listed as one row, because cutting a stay/leave/decide passage is one decision rather than five. Members keep their own rows — whether the run goes and which paragraph in it is weakest are different questions. Any multinuclear paragraph no run accounts for is named under the table rather than dropped; see references/relations.md.

3. Repetition pairs — same relation, same target, near-duplicate one-liners, by difflib as converge.py does it.

4. split paragraphs — the monster-paragraph list. These are rewrite candidates rather than deletions.

The run is read-only: the author picks by number, and the picks go in as an author-directed cycle.

audit <article.md>

Model run, after any rewrite pass. Each paragraph is read against its own marker and answered in one question: does it still do what the marker says? Verdicts are holds, eroded, or changed; mismatches are listed and nothing is repaired.

This is the erosion detector. The socratic run (substack GH-185) found real points compressed by successive passes into residue — each pass defensible alone, the sequence destructive. No other gate catches it, because every other gate compares a paragraph to its previous version. The marker states the paragraph's purpose, written before the passes ran, so it can catch what a diff cannot.

strip <article.md>

Removes every rst: marker and nothing else. Belongs on the paste checklist beside the SUBSCRIBE BLOCK comment.

check [--renumber] <article.md>

Validation on its own, and --renumber repairs -> n targets after the author adds or deletes paragraphs. A target whose referent was itself deleted is reported rather than guessed at.

Placement

draft → annotate → rank → author cuts → cycle
      → humanize chain (markers ride along) → audit
      → critic-panel / voice-critic → strip at paste

This skill's home is the caller's review phase (GH-208): a workflow command runs it after humanize's terminal stage, alongside critic-panel and voice-critic — it is not a stage of the humanize chain. The skill writes only comments, never prose, so running audit late does not violate the GH-57 read-only-after-terminal contract. That contract exists because a generative pass after the terminal stage regresses the text toward a model's centre; a run that cannot write prose cannot do that.

Model

annotate and audit run on the session model (Claude), one fresh-context agent per run, not on the Ollama second family. The cross-family rule protects prose diction, and this skill writes no prose. A weak labeller produces a wrong tree, and a wrong tree ranks the wrong paragraph for deletion — the labelling is the entire value of the skill. Author decision, 2026-08-22; the reasoning is in references/prompts.md.

rank, check, renumber, and strip make no model call at all.

What this skill will not tell you

• Whether a paragraph is any good. It reports function and distance from the point. A well-written restatement at depth 3 ranks exactly where a badly-written one does.
• What to cut. The sheet is a reading order for a decision. Nothing is deleted, and a ranking that reaches evidence is describing an article with nothing left to trim rather than recommending a cut.
• Whether the thesis is right. It measures the article against the thesis it was given. A coherent article arguing the wrong thing passes cleanly.

Dependencies

• .claude/scripts/md_paragraphs.py — paragraph extraction and line classification.
• .claude/scripts/prose_document.py — the document model markers survive.
• .claude/scripts/span_locks.py — the lock contract annotate respects.

Sources

• Mann, W. C. and Thompson, S. A. (1988). Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text 8(3), 243–281.
• Marcu, D. (1997). From discourse structures to text summaries. ACL. https://aclanthology.org/W97-0713/
• Maekawa et al. (2024). Can we obtain significant success in RST discourse parsing by using Large Language Models? EACL 2024. https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.171/
• Waterloo Writing and Communication Centre, Reverse Outline. https://uwaterloo.ca/writing-and-communication-centre/reverse-outline