synaptiai Prose Clarity
Owns the sentence- and paragraph-level form of drafted prose — never its truth, never its structure, never its claim state.
Iron Law
THE LINTER CATCHES FORM, NEVER TRUTH — AND A REQUIRED HEDGE ON AN I-STATE CLAIM IS NEVER A VIOLATION, IN ANY MODE.
A sentence that must carry [EV-####], keep Inferred:/Unknown:/Recommendation:, or preserve a limitation that keeps it true is correct at whatever length that takes. This skill fixes the form of slop. It cannot make a hollow paragraph true, and it never overrides an Iron Rule from another skill.
Classification is by passage, not by document
Any line inside a numbered or bulleted step sequence, a runbook or procedure block, or a command caption resolves to strict mode: 20-word sentence cap, full rule set. Everything else — narrative rationale, executive summary, due-diligence prose — resolves to STE-flavored: 25-word cap, relaxed dictionary, same active-voice and no-phrasal-verb discipline. This is mechanically detectable from list markers and fenced/table syntax, and it handles a single document that mixes both, which most of them do.
Hard categories — apply in every mode, always block
Banned marketing adjectives · banned phrasal verbs · semicolons · banned filler and hedge phrases (minus the carve-out below) · sentence-length cap for the resolved mode · paragraph cap (more than six sentences). Full lists: references/prose-style-and-vocabulary.md.
Advisory categories — reported, never block
Passive voice, nominalization, em-dash count. Both grammar checks are heuristic and false-positive-prone — this plugin's own reference docs use em-dashes constitutively, so em-dash must never gate release. Advisory hits feed dossier-pass-c-audience's Step 5 and the scorecard's Dimension 10 as context for whether a hard-category fix was genuine or superficial, not as findings on their own.
The epistemic-hedging carve-out
references/source-authority-and-claim-states.md requires specific hedge phrases as structural markers for Interpreted-state claims: "This suggests…", "The most likely reading is…", "Inferred from…", and the prose prefixes Inferred:, Unknown:, Recommendation:. These are the package's epistemic-honesty mechanism, not slop. A line opening with one of these markers is exempt from the hedge-phrase and sentence-length rules, in every mode, unconditionally. The full allow-list lives in references/prose-style-and-vocabulary.md — check it before ever touching a flagged hedge.
Precedence
Iron Rules from other skills always outrank this one. Where this skill and disclosure-gating appear to disagree on a public document, disclosure-gating wins — truth and legal exposure over style. Cross-document synonym rotation stays project-modeling's and dossier-pass-c-audience's job; this skill only concerns the document currently being drafted.
Self-lint procedure
Run bin/dossier-prose-lint.sh --file <path> --json. Fix hard-category hits with Edit. Re-run, capped at two revision passes — the same per-document budget discipline dossier-doc-drafter already applies to context. Return the draft regardless of outcome after the cap, and if a violation remains, say so plainly and name the Iron Rule that made the fix impossible (a required citation, a required hedge, an owner name that cannot shrink).
Output Format
PROSE_LINT=clean
or
PROSE_LINT={n} hard violation(s) after revision
| Category | Count | Location |
|---|---|---|
Rationalization Prevention
| Excuse | Response |
|---|---|
| "This adjective is technically accurate" | Concreteness is the axis, not accuracy. Replace it with the fact it stands in for. |
| "Hedging shows appropriate humility" | Only for an I-state claim carrying the required marker. Elsewhere a hedge is a claim you will not make — write Unknown:, or make the claim. |
| "Passive voice reads more objective here" | It hides the actor a reader needs. Name them, or state that the actor is unknown. |
| "The sentence is long because the fact is complex" | Split it. Two 15-word sentences carry the same fact and cost a reader less. |
| "The linter flagged my required hedge" | Check the allow-list in references/prose-style-and-vocabulary.md first. This is very likely a linter defect, not a prose defect. |
| "It's just one em-dash" | Em-dash is advisory, not blocking. Do not spend a revision pass chasing it. |
Integration
Loaded by dossier-doc-drafter for every document; it self-lints before returning a draft. Invoked independently by dossier-pass-c-audience in Step 5 — it re-runs the script itself rather than reading the drafter's self-report, preserving the Independence Protocol. Invoked by bin/dossier-gate.sh for release-gate condition G18, across the whole package. Referenced by Dimension 10 of references/scorecard-rubric.md for the advisory-category judgment context.
References: references/prose-style-and-vocabulary.md, references/source-authority-and-claim-states.md, references/release-gate-conditions.md.