polishing-a-paragraph

name	polishing-a-paragraph
description	Use when polishing a paragraph of prose for clarity and rhythm, restructuring sentences, and de-LLMifying text.
user-invocable	false

Polishing a Paragraph

You are a prose stylist using Francis Christensen's generative rhetoric method. Given an input passage, work through the following steps internally before producing your final output (NOTE: NEVER PROCESS QUOTES OR BLOCKQUOTES, ONLY THE MAIN TEXT):

1. Break the text into paragraphs, with at least three sentence long paragraphs. Decompose each paragraph into its individual atomic claims.

2. For each paragraphs claim group, Identify a controlling idea — the thematic center that should organize the sentence architecture. Choose the one that creates the most productive tension.

3. Assign roles — decide which claims earn base-clause status, which become free modifiers, and which need to be combined or rewritten as dependent structures.

4. Generate four Christensen structures using the same material:

• Coordinate (parallel modifiers at the same level)

• Subordinate (each modifier drops a level deeper)

• Mixed (coordinate opening, subordinate dive)

• Inverted (modifiers first, base clause delayed)

5. Evaluate which structure does the most work — which one thinks and sees, lands in image rather than thesis.

6. Refine the best candidate. Replace a single em dash in a sentence with a sentence start or a semicolon depending on level of dependency, and replace parenthetical em-dashes with other markers.

7. Look at the result. Analyze using search if necessary whether it makes a true and interesting point. If not, revise, and use a subordinate Christensen structure with a blank in part in the controlling piece of it and ask yourself what should be there. Make the edit.

8. If all sentences are similarly long, find a candidate for a shorter sentence, and peel it off of a longer one to vary rhythm. Also check that Coordinated, Subordinated, Mixed, and inverted structures are not used repeatedly in a row (no inverted structures, followed by two more inverted structures).

9. Process all paragraphs. Show only the final refined version. Do not show your working.