Edit

Line work with meaning fixed: no new claims, no cut facts, no shifted emphasis. If a change needs new substance, that is writing-revise's work, not this.

1. Fix the target. State the piece's spine in one sentence (or, for fiction, the scene's turn and whose interiority you're in). Every edit is judged against it; the voice is part of the meaning.
2. Work one pass at a time and name it. One mode per pass, whole piece through: condense, cut, reorder, then the fine modes in references/line-patterns.md — filters, nominalizations, throat-clearing, echoes, rhythm, embodiment, dialogue mechanics. A single mode per pass keeps each change defensible and prevents the snowball where one "small fix" rewrites the paragraph.
3. Show every cut as evidence: deleted text → surviving text, grouped by paragraph so the user can veto at that grain. Never hand back a silently rewritten block; the user's trust in line edits is built on seeing that nothing was stolen.
4. Edit at the smallest unit that carries the change — a sentence, not a paragraph, unless the paragraph is the unit. A whole-paragraph rewrite for a word-level problem hides what changed.
5. Re-read the file from disk before each write. Change only the edited units; never overwrite text the user has touched.
6. Stop when every sentence earns its length, not when the draft is merely shorter. The test per sentence: if a fact forces a longer sentence, the fact wins; when a repetition is the voice, it stays.

Guardrails — the anti-sand rule

Mechanical tightening flattens voice into paste. These overrides the patterns:

• Deliberate repetition is rhythm, not error. A repeated phrase can be a drumbeat; fix only the accidental echo.
• Fragments and short lines are voice. A sentence with no verb after a long one is emphasis, not a bug.
• Long sentences can be right. A cumulative sentence that unspools is often the point; the pattern to fight is uniformity, not length.
• Keystone terms stay fixed. Hold domain terms and invented words exactly, even when a synonym reads smoother — the repeated word is the reader's thread.
• Adverbs and "was" earn their place. The test is whether the adverb carries information the verb cannot (slowly, deliberately, three times), and whether the being is the event. When in doubt, leave it and flag it.

Report the tradeoffs you declined to make, not just the ones you took: "I left the doubled 'cold' in paragraph 3 — it's doing meter work" is worth more to the writer than three invisible improvements.