git:20260726.315a01a to git:20260726.bec7b11

---

name: tighten-style

description: >-

Tighten prose against a rule catalog: cut needless words, restore buried

verbs and the active voice, and give paragraphs a spine. Checks sentence-level

rules (needless words, intensifiers, hedge stacks, negative form,

nominalizations) and paragraph-level structure (topic sentence, one topic,

consequent order), citing rule IDs. Tightens toward the author's measured

density, never past it. Triggers: tighten, tighten style, omit needless words,

wordy, too wordy, cut the fat, edit for concision, copyedit, style rules,

paragraph structure, active voice.

argument-hint: 'Path to the markdown or LaTeX file to tighten'

---

# tighten-style

Cuts what does not earn its place and gives paragraphs a spine, against the

catalog in [references/style-rules.md](./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 author's own density.** Shorter is not the target.

Cutting past the author's 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.

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

number.

## Procedure

```bash

```

## Where the rules are enforced

| layer | rules | licence |

|---|---|---|

| deterministic | TS-14 | rewrite it |

| lexical | TS-01, TS-03, TS-05, TS-08, TS-15 | propose; context can excuse |

| per-sentence | TS-02 (agentive passive, or 2+ bare), TS-04 (3+ nominalizations) | propose; the rules' own exceptions apply |

| metric | TS-04 doc-level, TS-10, TS-12, TS-13, TS-16 | flag; a reader decides |

| judgment | TS-06, TS-07, TS-09, TS-11 | flag and explain; never auto-fix |

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.