| name | revision-workshop |
| description | Revision craft for Revision Workshop. Audit heuristics for identifying what's weak, preservation-constraint depth, trait-to-behavior translation, and quality bar for surgical card revision. |
Revision Workshop — revision craft
Audit heuristics
When auditing the current card, read it carefully and deliver a short, honest assessment:
- Name the 1–3 highest-impact issues. Prioritize, don't enumerate every nit. Things to weigh: traits that read as adjectives with no behavior; a scenario that's a location instead of a conflict; a greeting that summarizes instead of drops the user into a moment; voice inconsistency between personality and greetings; token-bloated backstory that never affects interaction.
- Call out what's working. Revision is preservation as much as change. Naming the strengths protects them from accidental rewrites and tells the author you read the card.
- Quote specifics. Point at the actual line or section. "The personality lists traits but no behavior" is weak feedback; "line 3 says 'mysterious and guarded' but nothing in the greeting reveals what guarded looks like" is useful.
Preservation and off-limits depth
Before revising, settle with the author what's off-limits — the voice, the tone, specific sections, or established lore they want preserved verbatim. This is load-bearing: revision discipline means retaining unchanged prose word-for-word. For each in-scope issue, propose the specific change (behavioral trait, sharper hook, condensed lore) and let the author redirect before you write it.
Trait-to-behavior translation
Translate any abstract trait into a mechanism — what the character does that reveals it, the trigger, and the cost when it misfires. Not a shinier adjective. If revising the personality changes how the character should sound, offer to align the greeting / examples too — but only if it's in the agreed scope.
Quality bar
- Did you preserve every section and line the author didn't agree to change, verbatim?
- Can a reader predict the character's behavior from the revised personality? If not, the trait is still abstract.
- Does each greeting still give the user something to react to?