Paraphrasis

Paraphrasis

Sense-for-sense restatement, with the meaning held still.

Named against its opposite. Metaphrase is word-for-word; paraphrase is sense-for-sense. Dryden drew the line and put the danger on this side of it: once you stop moving words and start moving sense, nothing mechanical is left to check your work. This skill is the check.

What this is for

One message, a different reader. A spec becomes an announcement. A finding becomes a landing page. Nine hundred words become ninety. The claim is supposed to survive all of it.

Usually it does not.

The third job

peitho forks two ways: Compose when no draft exists, Edit when one does. Restating is neither, and running it as either causes damage.

Edit protects the writer's voice by leaving the sentences alone. Restate cannot do that, because replacing the sentences is the entire assignment. So it needs a different guard, and the guard has to be on the meaning rather than the words.

The axiom

Everything may change except what is being claimed.

If the right column moved, you did not paraphrase. You wrote a different claim in a similar voice, which is the failure this skill exists to catch.

The fidelity ledger

Every restatement returns one. It is the deliverable, not a courtesy.

IN   →  Three seats on three providers returned three different rankings
        from one fixed prompt (Exhibit A, bb4aa857, 2026-08-15).

OUT  →  Ask three models the same question and you get three different
        answers. We logged it.

KEPT     three seats · three providers · three rankings · one prompt · logged
DROPPED  exhibit id, date          — recoverable from the source, not load-bearing here
ADDED    nothing

ADDED is the field that matters. Anything in the output with no ancestor in the input is invented, and inventing under a paraphrase reads as sourced when it is not. A non-empty ADDED line is a stop, not a note.

DROPPED needs a reason each time. "Cut for length" is only acceptable for detail that does not condition the claim. A caveat is never merely detail.

The drift catalog

Named failures. Restatement finds these on its own; nobody has to intend them.

Upgrade. Hedged becomes absolute. "seats disagreed in one session" → "councils reach better decisions." The most common drift by a distance, because the upgraded version is always the more useful sentence.

Scope creep. A bounded instance becomes a general property. "in one logged run" → "consistently." "on three of four providers" → "across providers."

Quantifier slide. some → most. up to → typically. can → does. Each step is small and defensible; the chain is not.

Agency shift. "can be configured to run locally" → "runs locally." Capability restated as behavior.

Evidence laundering. The attribution drops, the claim survives, and the claim now floats. This is how "studies show" gets written by people who are not lying.

Compression loss. Under a word count the qualifier is the cheapest thing to cut and usually the load-bearing one. When you shorten, cut examples before caveats. If the caveat will not fit, the claim does not fit either.

Register inflation. Neutral → marketing → superlative, one restatement per step, each one only slightly warmer than the last.

Nominalisation. "we measured X" → "X is proven." The actor disappears and the finding hardens.

Audience flattery. Restating for a buyer quietly removes what the buyer would not want to hear. The audience may change what you lead with. It may not change what is true.

The reversal test

Run before returning anything.

Paraphrase the output back toward the input. Is the round trip stronger than the original?

If restating your own OUT produces something the source would not support, you drifted, and the direction of the drift is now visible. Weaker is usually fine. Stronger never is.

Hostile and skeptical readers

A skeptical reader is not a different tone. It is a different burden of proof, and it moves in one direction: toward more evidence and narrower claims, never fewer and broader. Copy for a skeptic that hedges less than the original has inverted the assignment.

For a hostile reader, state the strongest version of their objection before your answer. Peitho's ethics rail requires the counterargument anyway. Here it is also the only thing that gets read.

The claims rail

If the project has a claims file, check the output against it before returning. Look for truth.md, claims-register.md, or a FORTRESS pack in a .monkeys/ folder.

Restatement is the exact moment a barred claim re-enters approved copy, because nobody re-checks a rewrite of something already approved. A rail that lists withdrawn wording exists precisely for this pass. Where a project bars an upgrade in writing, treat that bar as blocking rather than advisory.

Where no claims file exists, the ledger is the whole rail, and ADDED must be empty.

Delegation

Prose quality is peitho's. Invoke it for the output. Do not restate its rules here.

This skill decides what the restatement may and may not carry. Peitho decides how the resulting sentences read: the em-dash law, the tells, openings, closings, the honest-persuasion rail. Two skills, two jobs, one canonical home for each. When they disagree about a sentence, fidelity wins and Peitho gets the next pass.

Workflow

1. Name the audience. What they know, what they want, what they will not sit through, what they will resist. Vague audiences produce vague restatements.
2. Inventory the claims in the source. Each one separately, with its strength, scope, and attribution attached.
3. Decide what leads. This is the audience's real entitlement, and it is nearly all of the adaptation.
4. Restate. Move everything in the left column freely.
5. Build the ledger. KEPT, DROPPED with reasons, ADDED.
6. Run the reversal test.
7. Check the claims rail if one exists.
8. Hand the prose to peitho.
9. Return the restatement and the ledger together. Never the restatement alone.

Composes with

• peitho — the prose pass on the output. Always. Paraphrasis holds the meaning, Peitho makes the sentences read.
• fortress / fortress-truth — supplies the claims rail. Restating without one is how withdrawn wording returns.
• janus — when the same product must be said two opposed ways to two audiences and both must stay true, the contradiction is the positioning rather than a drift to launder.
• raid / raid-draft — channel-specific restatement, one message into many rooms.
• metaphrasis — the mirror. It crosses a medium literally, this crosses an audience faithfully.

Full graph in ../SKILLS-MAP.md.

References

• references/drift-catalog.md — worked before-and-after examples for every named drift
• references/audiences.md — audience models, and what each is genuinely entitled to