Plain wording

Type: types/instruction.md

Replace wording that costs the reader effort without carrying meaning: figures that display the writer, unusual words where a common word says the same thing, and exclusions that deny what the sentence has already ruled out.

Effort: simple. Listing and marking against a recorded threshold; the operator strikes.

  1. List every candidate with a proposed replacement. Do not apply any. Four kinds of candidate:
  2. A figurative phrase, with a literal statement.
  3. An unusual word, with the common word that says the same thing. Unusual means a general technical reader would pause on it or look it up: rare or learned words (ameliorate, adumbrate, orthogonal used for "independent"), Latin tags (inter alia, mutatis mutandis), and long words with a short everyday equivalent (utilize, endeavour, commence).
  4. A redundant exclusion, with the sentence without it. An exclusion is redundant when the positive clause already rules out what it denies: "a candidate, not a settled finding", "outside the term without being denied". Look at "not", "without", "only", and "rather than".
  5. A negation-first or contrast construction, with a positive statement: "X is not Y. It is Z", "not X but Y", "X, not Y", "does not A; it B", or a sentence that denies something and never states what is the case.
  6. For each figure, ask whether the mapping does work the literal phrase would need more words to do. A tradeoff as buying and paying, a successor chain as descent, an internal role as being inside: these stay. A dramatic or legal verb applied to an argument (indict, touch, rescue), a contest verb (lose, win), or an adverb of manner that adds no content (quietly, silently): these go.
  7. For each unusual word, ask whether the common word keeps the claim and its qualifications. Replace when it does. Keep when the common word drops a distinction the sentence relies on and no short plain phrase recovers it, and say which distinction. Replace every occurrence of a word with the same common word; one occurrence swapped and another kept reads as two referents.
  8. For each exclusion or contrast, state the positive claim. Keep an explicit negation only when readers would otherwise draw the excluded inference and the positive form cannot block it: the ordinary sense of a technical word ("conjectural" does not mean speculative), a position the KB used to hold, a status readers tend to inflate (not a success term), or a finding that is itself negative ("no run has been performed"). A contrast being the sentence's point is not enough to keep its negative form when a positive sentence carries the same point. Threshold set by the operator on 2026-09-25, after LLM-drafted articles overused contrast and negation.
  9. Return the list marked keep or replace, with the reason in a few words. The operator strikes items. Apply only what survives.
  10. When the literal phrase needs a referent the figure did not name (who is charged, what is at fault), do not choose one. Report the phrase as a question with the candidate referents.

Report: the applied replacements, one line each. The operator's strikes are recorded as the threshold for the next run.

Preserve: technical terms that look figurative or unusual but are the field's or the KB's registered words (seed, holding a theory, gradient descent, legible, ampliative); a term the artifact itself defines; and quoted text, which is never reworded. Whether a registered abstraction should give way to the ordinary word is the abstractions pass's question.