🛠️ Plain-words rewrite prompt

💡 Use Case

• I paste a finished draft and ask a language model for one thing: list every sentence I would not say aloud to a colleague across a table. Quote it. Do not rewrite it.
• It may point. It may not rewrite. A sentence it rewrites is a sentence I no longer understand from the inside.
• The name is misleading on purpose: the rewrite is the part I do. See 💭 I say it in plain words.
• Written on a Sunday in February, the week I caught myself using leverage as a verb in a slip memo.

⚖️ Pros & Cons

Pros

• It finds the abstract nouns in a row, the sentence with three ofs, the paragraph where nobody does anything.
• It is unembarrassed. Noor is kind about my worst sentence; this just lists it.
• Five minutes, and I learn which words I hide behind. This year: alignment, surface as a verb, going forward.

Cons

• It also flags sentences that are meant to be odd. Roughly one flag in four is wrong.
• Left alone it would sand every paragraph to the same grain.
• It cannot know what I would say aloud. It guesses from what most people would, and I am not trying to sound like most people.

🔄 Alternatives

• Reading the draft aloud, standing up. Slower and still better.
• The six rules at the end of 📰 Politics and the English Language, re-read on 16 November after a week of writing carefully about a no. They cost nothing and need no machine.