Prose Clarity

Owns the sentence- and paragraph-level form of drafted prose — never its truth, never its structure, never its claim state.

Iron Law

THE LINTER CATCHES FORM, NEVER TRUTH — AND A REQUIRED HEDGE ON AN I-STATE CLAIM IS NEVER A VIOLATION, IN ANY MODE.

A sentence that must carry [EV-####], keep Inferred:/Unknown:/Recommendation:, or preserve a limitation that keeps it true is correct at whatever length that takes. This skill fixes the form of slop. It cannot make a hollow paragraph true, and it never overrides an Iron Rule from another skill.

Classification is by passage, not by document

Any line inside a numbered or bulleted step sequence, a runbook or procedure block, or a command caption resolves to strict mode: 20-word sentence cap, full rule set. Everything else — narrative rationale, executive summary, due-diligence prose — resolves to STE-flavored: 25-word cap, relaxed dictionary, same active-voice and no-phrasal-verb discipline. This is mechanically detectable from list markers and fenced/table syntax, and it handles a single document that mixes both, which most of them do.

Hard categories — apply in every mode, always block

Banned marketing adjectives · banned phrasal verbs · semicolons · banned filler and hedge phrases (minus the carve-out below) · sentence-length cap for the resolved mode · paragraph cap (more than six sentences). Full lists: references/prose-style-and-vocabulary.md.

Advisory categories — reported, never block

Passive voice, nominalization, em-dash count. Both grammar checks are heuristic and false-positive-prone — this plugin's own reference docs use em-dashes constitutively, so em-dash must never gate release. Advisory hits feed dossier-pass-c-audience's Step 5 and the scorecard's Dimension 10 as context for whether a hard-category fix was genuine or superficial, not as findings on their own.

The epistemic-hedging carve-out

references/source-authority-and-claim-states.md requires specific hedge phrases as structural markers for Interpreted-state claims: "This suggests…", "The most likely reading is…", "Inferred from…", and the prose prefixes Inferred:, Unknown:, Recommendation:. These are the package's epistemic-honesty mechanism, not slop. A line opening with one of these markers is exempt from the hedge-phrase and sentence-length rules, in every mode, unconditionally. The full allow-list lives in references/prose-style-and-vocabulary.md — check it before ever touching a flagged hedge.

The verbatim-collection exemption

07-verification/documentation-verification-report.md carries pass output that /dossier:audit Phase 3 requires to be collected unmodified. bin/dossier-prose-lint.sh recognizes an explicit <!-- DOSSIER_VERBATIM_BEGIN --> / <!-- DOSSIER_VERBATIM_END --> marker pair and exempts only the text between them from this skill's hard categories, and only when scanning that one file — the round heading and summary block outside the markers, and every other document in the package, are still linted normally. The markers are ordinary inert HTML comments everywhere else, so this is not a general "wrap it to exempt it" mechanism available to a document under revision. This exemption is specific to dossier-prose-lint.sh — it is not honored by bin/dossier-claim-scan.sh or any other dossier check. See references/release-gate-conditions.md G18 for the full mechanism and its malformed-marker handling.

Precedence

Iron Rules from other skills always outrank this one. Where this skill and disclosure-gating appear to disagree on a public document, disclosure-gating wins — truth and legal exposure over style. Cross-document synonym rotation stays project-modeling's and dossier-pass-c-audience's job; this skill only concerns the document currently being drafted.

Self-lint procedure

Run bin/dossier-prose-lint.sh --file <path> --json. Fix hard-category hits with Edit. Re-run, capped at two revision passes — the same per-document budget discipline dossier-doc-drafter already applies to context. Return the draft regardless of outcome after the cap, and if a violation remains, say so plainly and name the Iron Rule that made the fix impossible (a required citation, a required hedge, an owner name that cannot shrink).

Output Format

PROSE_LINT=clean

or

PROSE_LINT={n} hard violation(s) after revision
| Category | Count | Location |
|---|---|---|

Rationalization Prevention

Excuse	Response
"This adjective is technically accurate"	Concreteness is the axis, not accuracy. Replace it with the fact it stands in for.
"Hedging shows appropriate humility"	Only for an I-state claim carrying the required marker. Elsewhere a hedge is a claim you will not make — write Unknown:, or make the claim.
"Passive voice reads more objective here"	It hides the actor a reader needs. Name them, or state that the actor is unknown.
"The sentence is long because the fact is complex"	Split it. Two 15-word sentences carry the same fact and cost a reader less.
"The linter flagged my required hedge"	Check the allow-list in references/prose-style-and-vocabulary.md first. This is very likely a linter defect, not a prose defect.
"It's just one em-dash"	Em-dash is advisory, not blocking. Do not spend a revision pass chasing it.

Integration

Loaded by dossier-doc-drafter for every document; it self-lints before returning a draft. Invoked independently by dossier-pass-c-audience in Step 5 — it re-runs the script itself rather than reading the drafter's self-report, preserving the Independence Protocol. Invoked by bin/dossier-gate.sh for release-gate condition G18, across the whole package. Referenced by Dimension 10 of references/scorecard-rubric.md for the advisory-category judgment context.

References: references/prose-style-and-vocabulary.md, references/source-authority-and-claim-states.md, references/release-gate-conditions.md.