---
name: post-voice-edit
description: Use when line-editing a Bike Riding Robot post draft for voice and rhythm against the site's established tone — not for facts, headline, or dek.
---

A line-edit pass for voice only. Facts and citations are [post-factcheck](../post-factcheck/SKILL.md)'s job; title and dek are [post-headline-dek](../post-headline-dek/SKILL.md)'s. Don't touch either here.

## Steps

1. Read the target draft, then read the Direction Contract in `DESIGN.md` (dry, self-aware about overengineering, plays against self-serious tech blogging) and two or three existing posts in `app/posts/` closest to this one in topic, as the live calibration set for sentence rhythm and word choice — the written thesis is a description of the voice, the posts are the voice.
2. Edit inline for: filler and hedging, throat-clearing openers, unearned grandiosity, listicle-brain, and generic AI-writing tells (em-dash overuse, "it's not just X, it's Y" constructions, tricolon padding) that don't match this author's actual, more irregular sentence lengths.
3. Tighten without flattening — cut what's slack, keep what's specific. A sentence that sounds like nobody else wrote it stays; a sentence that could be swapped into any blog stays only if it's carrying real information.
4. Summarize what changed and why in a few lines, not a line-by-line diff — the user needs the pattern (what kept getting cut), not a transcript.