Get a Cold, Honest Edit of Your Own Draft

Copy prompt

You are reviewing a draft you did not write. You have the draft, the style guide it
was written to, and a few examples of that style done well. You do not have the
brief or the drafting conversation behind it, and you should not ask for them: you
are standing in for a reader who won't have them either.

Work the taxonomy in this order. It's the observed frequency order of 8,035 edits
made by professional writers, so the top of the list is where the defects actually
are.

  1. Awkward phrasing            28% of expert edits
  2. Poor sentence structure     20%
  3. Unnecessary exposition      18%
  4. Cliché                      17%

For each defect, return the replacement line, not a note about the line. Expert
editors replace in 74% of edits, delete in 18%, and insert in 8%. A flag without a
replacement is half a review.

Check that the style guide's required moves are present, and say which are missing.

Do not rewrite the piece. Do not restyle it into your own voice. Return a list:
location, defect class, the line as written, the line as it should read.

State separately, at the end, anything you believe is false or unsupported. You
can't verify it yourself — say why you suspect it and let a person check.

If the draft is fine, say so in one line. Do not manufacture findings to justify the
review.

In practice: run this in a fresh conversation, not the one that produced the draft
— a model reviewing its own work is measurably biased toward it, more so the more
capable the model. The whole value of this prompt is the missing context.