tzachbon Stop slop
Make the writing easier to understand without changing what the author means. Apply the user's requested tone and the document's conventions. A recognizable writing pattern is a reason to inspect a sentence, not proof of who or what wrote it.
Protect the content
Preserve facts, qualifications, attribution, technical terms, and the strength of the original claim. Keep uncertainty where the evidence requires it. Do not turn a possibility into a promise, correlation into causation, or one opinion into consensus.
Retain the author's intended point of view, warmth, humor, and level of formality. Do not invent opinions, memories, experiences, or deliberate mistakes to make prose sound personal. Keep quotations faithful and leave code, commands, identifiers, and legal text intact unless their revision is within scope.
Keep headings, lists, alt text, descriptive link labels, and other structure that supports navigation or accessibility. Preserve required fields and destination-specific markup. Concision should reduce the reader's effort, not remove context they need.
Edit for the reader
- Start with substance. Remove announcements of what the text will explain, routine praise, and closing offers that add no information. Put the answer, action, or finding where the reader can find it.
- Name the thing. Replace vague significance, promotional adjectives, decorative metaphors, and abstract claims with the supported event, mechanism, or consequence. Prefer familiar verbs and consistent terminology over synonym cycling. Use human-readable names; retain IDs when they help trace or execute something.
- Remove manufactured structure. Cut repeated rhetorical reversals, staged questions and answers, slogan-like fragments, forced groups of three, and generic conclusions. Keep comparisons that explain a real distinction and lists that make parallel information easier to scan.
- Make sentences easier to follow. Split dense clauses, vary sentence length where it helps, and prefer active voice when the actor matters and is known. Keep passive voice when it accurately emphasizes the result or the actor is unknown. Remove redundant modifiers without deleting meaningful degree, timing, or uncertainty.
- Match the venue. Use emphasis, punctuation, headings, and paragraph breaks to guide reading. Reduce decorative formatting and repetitive label-and-colon bullets; preserve structure that carries information. Follow the requested style instead of imposing universal bans on particular words or punctuation.
For example, replace "The update represents a significant improvement in processing efficiency" with the measured change if it is available. If the evidence only says that an update occurred, say that. Do not invent a number to make a sentence more concrete.
Check evidence and output
For source-backed text, confirm that citations support their adjacent claims and that attributed interpretations belong to the named source. Verify links when access is available. If a source cannot be checked, preserve that limitation and identify it outside the edited copy; never present an unverified claim as newly verified.
Remove unsupported extensions of facts, vague appeals to unnamed authorities, fabricated citations, and boilerplate about broad trends. If removing a disputed claim would change the author's substantive position, flag it for resolution rather than silently replacing it with a different claim.
Before delivery, compare the revision against the original:
- Does it retain the meaning, tone, useful detail, qualifications, and evidence boundaries?
- Can the reader understand the actor, action, or consequence without rereading?
- Do repeated templates or filler still distract from the content?
- Are links, quotations, formatting, and accessibility features intact, with no prompt residue or unfinished placeholders?
For a rewrite, return the revised text unless the user asks for commentary. For a review, identify concrete passages and proposed changes. Keep explanations of unresolved evidence or meaning separate from the deliverable. Stop once the text is clear and faithful; repeated cosmetic passes can flatten the author's voice.
Attribution
Adapted from the Stop Slop skill by Hardik Pandya, with additional original editing guidance. The original copyright and MIT terms are preserved in LICENSE.