Tighten Style

tighten-style

Cuts what does not earn its place and gives paragraphs a spine, against the catalog in references/style-rules.md. Every finding cites a rule ID, so the report reads as a copyedit keyed to a document you can argue with rather than a list of opinions.

The rules are ours. They cover the ground Strunk covered and the ground he could not — he wrote before markdown and before a machine could produce fluent prose with nothing behind it.

The floor

Tightening stops at the target register's own density. Shorter is not the target. Cutting past the measured function-word ratio manufactures the clipped, aphoristic register that reads as machine-written — the failure filter-tells calls overshoot. Where a writing-voice/ corpus exists, match-structure supplies that floor; without one, stop at each rule's stated threshold.

The floor is venue-keyed (GH-338). By default it is the author's own density. With --venue <name>, the venue profile (writing-voice/venues/<name>.yaml, see the writing-voice rule) supplies it instead: the profile's targets (sentence_length_mean/stdev) become the sentence floor — a whitepaper tightened to newsletter density reads clipped — and its hedge_policy keys the TS-08 threshold: zero flags every hedge (book voice, rule 10), minimal flags pairs, calibrated keeps single calibrated hedges on empirical claims and only flags stacks. An explicit --sent-floor still wins over the profile. No --venue, no change.

Never touch a direct quotation, a normative requirement, a citation, or a number.

Procedure

python3 <tighten-style>/scripts/check_style.py <file> [--json] [--hedge-policy zero|minimal|calibrated]
python3 <tighten-style>/scripts/tighten.py --article <file> [--venue <name>]   # the rewrite, via Ollama
python3 <tighten-style>/scripts/tighten.py --article <file> --check-only   # plan without model calls

1. Run the checker for the findings and the reading pass for the judgment rules (TS-06, TS-07, TS-09, TS-11) it cannot see.
2. Run the tightener for the rewriting. It selects the instead→do pairs for the rules each paragraph fired, prompts the second model family with the pairs — never the rule prose — and gates every candidate with match-voice's verify step. Paragraphs that fail the gate keep their original text.
3. Read the register markers it prints (passive, agentive, nominalization, connectives, before → after). Rising markers on a shrinking draft mean the pass moved toward the assistant register, which is the failure this design exists to prevent.
4. Do not tighten by hand-applying the rules with the drafting model. The full evidence is in references/hand-tightening-regression.md. GH-222 measured what that does: a paper excerpt moved from distance 26.1 to 6.5 from the AI-draft fingerprint under a faithful rules pass, overshooting the draft's own passive rate. The rules read as instructions by an instruction-tuned model ARE that model's register. The catalog stays for understanding and for the checker; the pairs are its delivery.

The stopping rules are unchanged: the author-density floor, and never touching quotations, normative text, citations, or numbers — now enforced by the gate rather than by discipline.

Where the rules are enforced

Metric rules delegate to match-structure, which already measures passive density, nominalization density, list ratio, and the paragraph-schema signals (topic overlap, cohesion, subject churn) that TS-10 is built on. Those signals were first written to detect an AI tell; what they actually measure is whether a paragraph has a spine, which is why they serve here too.

Boundary with filter-tells

filter-tells removes what should not be there. tighten-style compresses what remains and structures it. match-voice restores how it should sound. Run tighten-style before match-voice — tightening changes sentence shapes, and there is no point matching voice on prose about to be rewritten.

The parallelism collision, explicitly: filter-tells flags parallel cadence as an AI tell; TS-12 requires parallel form for coordinate content. If both fire on one passage, ask whether the ideas are genuinely coordinate. If they are, keep the form and dismiss the tell. If they are not, the cadence is the problem and TS-12 does not apply.

What the checker will not tell you

It reads lists, densities, and now the per-sentence passive and nominalization shapes (GH-223 — a paragraph of textbook passives once returned zero findings while the description promised "restore the active voice"). It still cannot tell whether a paragraph earns its place in the argument, whether the concrete detail is the right detail, or whether a hedge is honest calibration or evasion. On prose that is already lexically clean — which the author's own tends to be — nearly all the remaining work is the reading pass, and the script's silence is not a verdict.

Dependencies

match-structure for the metric rules and the density floor, match-voice's verify step for the gate, and the shared paragraph extractor. The checker itself is stdlib.