v1.0.3 to v1.1.0

---

name: revenantworks-foundation-commwright

description: Shapes any message to its channel and audience. Drafts human by default in a neutral professional voice; a specific brand voice applies only when named or handed in — voice definitions live in brandwright, and defining or saving one, even as "commwright voice", routes there. Trigger to write, rewrite, reshape, or shorten an email, text, Slack or Teams message, release notes, YouTube title, social post, or Discord announcement; to make it more formal or casual; to humanize a message that reads like AI or ChatGPT, stripping em dashes and emoji — a README, CLAUDE.md, or reference doc is skillwright’s prose, not commwright’s; for release comms or a comms plan; or when they name "commwright" for message or channel work ("commwright formats", "commwright audit", "commwright humanize"). It never sends.

license: MIT

metadata:

profile: standalone

pack: foundation

brand: revenantworks

volatile:

- file: references/channel-profiles.md

class: event-driven

---

# revenantworks-foundation-commwright

*history in CHANGELOG.md · sources in SOURCES.md · MIT (LICENSE)*

One message in → the right shape out, per channel and audience. commwright owns the form of a message — register, length, structure, title — never its delivery and never its facts. It drafts **neutral professional by default**, and that default is **humanized**: no em or en dashes in any role, no emoji, no preamble or trailing help offer, on every draft without being asked. A specific brand voice is applied only when one is named for the message or handed in, and those voice definitions live in brandwright, not here.

**Workflow:** Intake → Resolve channel *(+ any named voice)* → Draft *(humanized by default)* → Pre-publish hygiene *(public-bound only)* → Output

## Turn shape

1. **One clean draft is the default.** Produce 2–3 variants only when stakes genuinely compete (apologize vs. hold firm; urgency vs. warmth). Each is labeled by the strategy it takes, never by tone adjectives alone. Variant spam is a defect.

2. **Render through the surface's tools.** Before outputting, scan the tool list: if a message-compose or option-presenting tool exists, deliver drafts and variant choices through it; otherwise plain text in a copy-ready block. Describing a tappable form without checking the tool list is the known failure.

3. **commwright never sends.** It hands back the message; delivery belongs to the surface's own mail, chat, or posting tools. Offering to send is out of bounds. Offering the finished draft is the job.

4. **A bare invocation answers, it never drafts.** `commwright` on its own returns a capability line of three sentences or fewer, closing on a question about what to shape. No draft, no sample.

## Humanized default

Every draft is humanized silently: no announcement, no report line, no offer to humanize afterward. A draft that needed humanizing was a defective draft. **H1 to H9 below are the complete enforceable set, and this is their only home.** Each states its counting unit and its threshold inline, because a rule whose count lives in an unloaded file is not a rule. They bind every draft and the body is always loaded, so they ride here at no extra cost; `references/humanize.md` elaborates them and states none of them. A breach is a defect, not a preference. **H1 and H2 are absolute:** they bind every entry, including text a human wrote and handed in under the Humanize entry.

- **H1 dash law.** No em dash (U+2014) and no en dash (U+2013) anywhere in output, in any role, and none of the lookalikes a naive check misses: U+2012 figure dash, U+2015 horizontal bar, U+2212 minus. Hyphen-minus inside compound words stays (well-known, pre-publish, follow-up, p95); number and date ranges take "to" or a hyphen ("8 to 10 words", "8-10 words", "Mon to Fri"). The repair is never substitution: a comma leaves a limp aside or a splice, a semicolon leaves a dash in disguise. Recast with the punctuation the sentence actually wants (full stop, comma, colon, parentheses) or split the sentence in two. Ceiling on the recast: at most one parenthetical per paragraph, or the habit has only changed character.

- **H2 emoji law.** Zero emoji in output by default, every channel, Slack, Teams, Discord, social, and YouTube included: as bullet markers, as header decoration, as shortcodes that render as emoji (`:tada:`). Override: a human can ask for emoji on a specific message and commwright complies without argument, warning, or lecture. The ask is its own ceiling, since no profile allows any. It covers that message only, is never inferred from an earlier message, and never carries into the next draft.

- **H3 length variance.** Counting unit: sentences of running prose; bullets are not sentences and do not count. Floor: in any output of four or more sentences, at least one runs eight words or fewer, and the floor scales, one such sentence per five. Ceiling, above roughly forty words: at least one sentence runs over fifteen words, and no four consecutive sentences sit inside a four-word band. The floor breaks the 15-to-25 monotone; the ceiling stops a clipped monotone replacing it.

- **H4 no preamble.** The first sentence carries information. No restatement of the request, no "Great question", "Absolutely", "Certainly", "I'd be happy to". A salutation is not preamble. H4 also bites on meta-commentary anywhere in the draft, not only at the top ("I kept the numbers unchanged").

- **H5 no trailing help offer.** Output ends on its last substantive line. Banned closers: "Let me know if you have any questions", "Let me know if you need anything else", "Feel free to reach out", "Hope this helps"; a closing line that only signals availability is the same closer in new phrasing. A real next step ("reply by Thursday if that date breaks") is content and stays.

- **H6 no recap paragraph.** If a paragraph introduces no new fact and no ask, cut it. The test is position-independent, so it bites mid-body as well as at the close. A promised future action is a commitment, a commitment is a fact, and facts are content, so that paragraph stays. Register floor: minutes, contracts, and executive summaries recap on purpose.

- **H7 banned constructions.** Exact match: "It's not just X, it's Y" and "not X, but Y" *as a rhetorical inflation frame*; "In today's fast-paced world"; "In the ever-evolving landscape of"; "at the end of the day"; "whether you're X or Y"; "delve into"; "deep dive" and "dive into" as metaphor; "It's worth noting that"; "It's important to remember that". Sentence-initial "Moreover", "Furthermore", "Additionally": cut the connective and keep the sentence, or cut the sentence. A literal correction is fine ("send it to Dana, not Chris"); the inflation is not ("not a feature, but a philosophy").

- **H8 one hedge per independent clause.** Counting unit: the independent clause, not the sentence. Two in one clause is the breach. Three classes: modals (may, might, could, would, should), hedging adverbs (possibly, potentially, generally, typically, arguably, somewhat, relatively, roughly), and frames ("it may be worth", "one could argue", "in some cases", "we think"). The classes catch form, not function: a modal that grants permission or names an obligation, and an adverb that marks measurement precision, are not hedges. Before deleting a qualifier, check whether the sentence now claims more than the original did; if it does, that qualifier carried a fact and it stays. If the writer has a position, state it.

- **H9 name the actor.** Every sentence has a subject who acts. No agentless passive ("a decision was made", "clarification will be provided", "it was determined") and no verb hiding in a noun ("provide clarification" is clarify, "conduct a review" is review, "make a decision" is decide). Repair, in that order: name the actor the source supplies; failing that, recast so the sentence needs no actor; failing that, keep the source's passive and raise the actor as a question. An actor the source never names is a fact you do not have, so never guess one, in any person: "we" and "our team" are the habit, and a bare "they" the source never supplied is the same invention wearing a third person, invisible to a first-person check. **H9 loses to the freeze, and it is the rule most likely to break it** (first execution, 2026-07-24: two independent cases failed this way and no other rule failed at all, one by inventing an actor, one by shedding a manner fact while recasting). **Repair step two is guarded too.** A legitimate actorless recast changes the verb's form or drops to a nominal label and nothing else, carrying the source's events, completion, modality, manner, attachments, and agency unchanged. All seven fact moves catalogued under *Fact integrity on repair* bind here and that block is their only home, so work the list there rather than a shorter one: a diff for a new actor and a lost adverbial catches two of the seven, which makes it the floor and not the test. A repair can clear it using no word the source lacks and still assert what the source never said, so run the claim-level check on every H9 repair before accepting it. If the only way to name an actor is to invent one, take repair step three and leave the passive standing. Register floor, scoped by artifact and not by topic: the formal artifact uses the passive on purpose (a postmortem, a legal notice, a status-page notice), a channel update about one does not.

**What replaces a tell.** H1 to H9 are subtractive and subtraction alone yields clean, dead prose. Every cut leaves a hole; four moves fill it. Name the actor. Use the specific verb the abstraction was standing in for. Insert the number, date, or name the vague phrase was hiding, but only when the source supplies it. Take a position and end the sentence. Contractions are the default register floor for family, work email, text, Slack, Teams, and Discord; formal email, legal notices, and release notes take them or leave them, and no contractions there is a pass, not a shortfall. Over-application reads as dead as the tells did: a draft with nothing left to cut and nothing added is a failed repair, not a finished one.

**Frozen content, every entry.** H1 to H9 bind what commwright writes, never what it is quoting: quoted material, code blocks, proper nouns, and pasted third-party text come through untouched.

**Fact integrity on repair.** Removing a tell never removes a fact and never adds one, and the check is at claim level, not word level. Every claim in the repaired text is a claim the source makes, with the same subject, the same object, the same scope, and the same modality. Seven ways a repair moves a fact, and this is the complete list. Two of them a diff for a new actor and a lost adverbial catches: a word the source lacks arrives (an invented actor is the common one), or a manner, means, time, or scope word is dropped ("were fixed by hand" becoming "are fixed", the executed H9 breach). Five survive that diff, because none of them adds an actor the source lacks and none drops a manner or means word: a modifier reattaches ("worked on it for several weeks" becomes weeks spent on the dependencies); a noun is promoted out of a prepositional phrase, an object, or a possessive into the actor slot ("the referral was faxed from the clinic" becomes "the clinic faxed the referral"); two source events merge into one under H9's second repair step ("turned up at 09:14" for "was identified at 09:14, when elevated error rates were observed" fuses a detection and an observation); a completed event becomes a standing state or an unmet need ("has been notified" becoming "knows", "were fixed by hand" becoming "needed a manual fix"); an implied agent is deleted ("was paused" becoming "paused" says nothing acted). Surviving the diff is not tracing every word: three of the five coin a word the source lacks and two coin none, so a novel-token scan draws no line either. The merge is the near miss, since the clause it fuses away is adverbial. The seven are detection classes, not a partition, so one repair can trip two at once ("knows" coins a word and converts a completed event) and the overlap costs nothing: any single hit rejects the repair. Check attachment, aspect, modality, and agency on both sides. A plausible specific is fabrication, and fabrication outranks any tell it fixed.

**Channel contracts win.** A length ceiling holds even when a repair wants room (cut content-free words, never a fact), and a profile's required structure (a Slack bold lead line, Keep-a-Changelog buckets, YouTube chapter lists) is contract, not decoration. Required structure binds the shape, not the characters: where a profile's own template shows a dash, the structure holds and H1 still picks the punctuation. Precedence, top down: frozen facts → channel length and required structure → H1 to H9 → the judgement rules catalogued in `humanize.md` (rule of three, machined parallelism, over-signposting, and the rest) → lexicon preference. H5 and H7 have an exact-match core here and a wider family that is judgement; that family is anchored in the catalog and sits at the catalog's tier. A handed-in brandwright voice profile enters at lexicon preference: its vocabulary, register, and sign-off wording are honored, H1 and H2 still bind the rendered message, any collision is named in the handback, and commwright never edits the profile. Humanize never drags a message down a register to sound human.

## Load budget

A standard draft touches **one** reference file: the matching section of `channel-profiles.md`. That is the whole per-draft cost because H1 to H9 ride inline above, in a body that is already loaded — the hard rules add no file to open. Reach further only as listed.

- `channel-profiles.md` — every draft; the target channel's section only

- `humanize.md` — **not** a per-draft load. It states no rule: H1 to H9 above are complete and binding on their own. What it adds is everything that will not fit inline — per-rule detection and repair *technique* (the constraints a repair has to satisfy bind, so they ride in the body, H9's step-two guard included), and the wider tell catalog the body does not carry (bold mid-sentence, headers on short content, Title Case labels, listification, opener and paragraph uniformity, rule of three, machined parallelism, zero fragments, wordiness pairs, verb inflation, email boilerplate, over-signposting, both-sides framing, terminal qualifier), plus the lexicon smell list and its decision procedure, one worked repair, the residual risks, and the contested cases. Those catalog rules are judgement, not defects, and they sit below H1 to H9 in precedence. Reach for it on three occasions: **Entry — Humanize**, **`commwright audit`**, and a draft long or tell-dense enough that the catalog earns its cost.

- `pack.md` — boundary doubt about a sibling's territory only

No reference file here holds a **voice**, so none of the above is ever the load for one — see *Voice belongs to brandwright* under Behavior notes for the rule and how a named voice arrives.

## Volatile surfaces

One file carries state that can drift; everything else is durable doctrine.

- `references/channel-profiles.md` — **event-driven**. The per-channel tone registers and length contracts; restamped when a platform's conventions visibly change (asked for in an ordinary request), never on a clock. The last-restamped date lives in the file's own header stamp.

The `metadata.volatile` block declares this so `skillwright upkeep` can include commwright in a pack-wide sweep.

## Restraint — when not to draft

**Deceptive impersonation** (a message meant to pass as a specific real person without their part in it) or **harassment** (a message built to intimidate or pile on): decline in one plain sentence and offer the honest version — a firm complaint, a clear boundary, a direct ask. **Fabricated facts:** commwright shapes what it's given; it invents quotes, numbers, or commitments for no one — gaps go back to the requester as questions.

## Entry — Build

A message from intent ("tell my landlord the sink leaks", "announce v2.1 on Discord"). Capture intent, audience, and channel from the request and conversation before asking anything; ask only when the channel is genuinely ambiguous, once. Resolve the channel profile, draft to the profile's contracts in the neutral default voice — or a named voice if one was handed in — and deliver per Turn shape.

## Entry — Reshape

An existing message plus a new target ("make this email a Teams post", "same text, formal"). Facts are frozen — reshape changes register, length, and structure, never content. If the target channel's length contract cannot hold the facts, say which facts don't fit and ask which to cut rather than silently dropping any.

## Entry — Humanize

"commwright humanize", or existing text plus "strip the AI tells" / "make this sound less like a bot" — usually text commwright didn't write. Facts are frozen exactly as Reshape freezes them: removing a tell never removes a fact, number, name, date, or commitment, and never adds one. Evaluative and morale content is not a frozen fact: it goes when nothing is left once its tells are gone, and it stays, in plainer words, when a repair leaves it still saying something. It removes what H1 to H9 name and what `humanize.md` catalogs, and nothing else — not a shortening, not a channel change, not a register change; if the text also needs a new channel, that's Reshape, on request. A source already past its channel ceiling is a Reshape too: humanize does not shorten to fit and does not pad to fill. Subject lines, titles, and header labels are part of the object; salutation and sign-off are the writer's. Frozen content is untouched here as on every entry.

**The writer's quirks stay, H1 and H2 excepted.** Their comma habit, their pet word, their greeting, their sign-off, their sentence rhythm, their odd phrasing: all of it survives, because humanize removes machine tells and not personal ones. Their em dashes and their emoji do not survive. H1 and H2 are house policy and they are absolute, so handed-in text comes back dash-free and emoji-free even where the dashes were the writer's own habit — there is no density threshold and no keep-the-habit carve-out. Name that removal in the report line rather than letting it pass as untouched. The one relief is a request to keep the emoji on that message, which is the H2 per-message override and dies with the message.

Close with **one line**: what was removed by category, plus any flagged word kept on purpose and why.

## Entry — Formats

"commwright formats": list the channel profiles and their contracts from `channel-profiles.md` in one compact table — no draft.

## Entry — Audit

**Where voice sits in an audit.** Channel drift is always in scope. Voice conformance is scored as one contract area only when a voice was named for that message or handed in with it — a neutral-default message has no voice definition to conform to, so the area is skipped, never guessed at. Deep *voice* drift against a defined brand voice (lexicon, register, and sign-off conformance across a body of copy) is brandwright audit's specialty — point the user there when the finding is about identity fidelity rather than channel fit.

## Cadence sets

A request for release comms or a comms plan yields a **dated set**, not one message: build-log note → release-day announcements (per channel) → follow-up. Each entry names its channel, date slot, and profile; the set is the release leg of the foundation pack's Forge Run capstone.

**Vary the set, not just the sentence.** H1 to H9 are uniform, so unchecked their output is too: every message opening on a fact, closing on the last substantive line, carrying the same short sentence. Across a set, vary the opening move (fact, ask, number, name) and let one message run long. Sameness across messages is the same tell as sameness across sentences.

## Pre-publish hygiene

Anything public-bound (release notes, social, Discord, YouTube) gets a redaction sweep before delivery: personal names and contact info not meant for the audience, internal URLs/hostnames/repo paths, filesystem paths, account identifiers, credentials of any kind (flag loudly; never echo the value). Report what was redacted in one line. Private, person-to-person messages skip the sweep unless asked.

## Anti-patterns

- **Faking humanity.** Humanize removes what a machine added — it never adds invented typos, forced folksiness, slang the writer doesn't use, or an anecdote that didn't happen.

## Behavior notes

**Scope.** The message is the deliverable, and it is always bound for a channel. Sending → the surface's tools. Long-form documents and research write-ups → lorewright. Prompts → promptwright. A repo file's tone (a README, CLAUDE.md, or reference doc) → skillwright: that prose is skillwright's object, not commwright's, so a humanize or tighten ask on one routes there, and "humanize the README" or "humanize my CLAUDE.md" is a skillwright ask, not a commwright one. This is a routing boundary, not a load; commwright never opens skillwright's directory to honor it. This is the one home for that boundary; the description states it as metadata and `humanize.md` points here.

**Voice belongs to brandwright.** commwright applies a voice; it never defines, saves, or stores one. The neutral professional default needs no definition. To apply a house or persona voice, name it and hand in (or point to) its brandwright voice-profile export — commwright reads that profile for the message and no further. The identity firewall still binds: a creator/persona voice never appears in professional channels, and vice versa, unless the request names that voice explicitly for that message. The reader's channel norms outrank the author's brand.

**Humanize is a register, not a voice.** It has nothing to define, nothing to save, and no name — so it never becomes something a request can store. "Make this message sound less like AI" is commwright; "make our brand voice sound more human" edits a stored voice definition and is brandwright. Defining, saving, editing, or restyling a voice is brandwright's under every name a request can arrive in: "my commwright voice", the `commwright humanize` subcommand, or no name at all. Asking to make a way of writing standing, default, or "how we always write" is a store-ask even when the word "voice" never appears. The rules govern the *messages commwright writes* — never a pack's own docs, a SKILL body, or any other file it is pointed at.

**Never pad.** The shortest message that does the job wins the channel. Length contracts are ceilings, not targets.