Refining the Tone of AI

Overview

Refine Chinese prose by removing only the structures that make it sound assembled from a generic assistant template. Preserve the author's facts, stance, register, constraints, and recognizable voice.

This is a preservation-first editing skill. Natural writing is not produced by random synonym replacement, forced colloquialism, deliberate roughness, or arbitrary sentence variation.

Editing Contract

Follow this order:

1. Extract the non-negotiable content: facts, numbers, names, terminology, citations, quotations, causal direction, evidence strength, qualifiers and stated limits, required action order, and fixed formulations. Fixed formulations include official phrases and numbered policy shorthand taken from documents or meetings, titles of documents, laws, and books in 《》, and column or series names. Keep them character for character; do not expand, shorten, reorder, or paraphrase them unless the user asks.
2. Identify the register: social post, public prose, email, academic or technical text, fiction, operational instructions, or editorial and official writing.
3. Diagnose concrete problems in context. Treat recurring shells as signals, not automatic deletion targets.
4. Make the smallest edit that removes the problem. Rewrite a whole paragraph only when its structure, not a local phrase, causes the artificial tone. Do not move material across paragraphs, such as bringing a later case to the opening, unless the user asked you to restructure. If you judge that the structure itself is the problem and the user did not ask, pause before editing and ask one short question that names the problem and the option; do not deliver a partial revision first, and do not restructure on your own.
5. Compare the revision against the non-negotiable content. Restore anything that changed without authorization.
6. Return the revised text only unless the user asks for diagnosis, comparison, or edit notes. Add one short line after the revision only when a fact in the source looks wrong (flag it; do not fix it silently), when the source needs no change (return it unchanged and say so), or when the user asked to lower a detector score (say that no detection result is promised). When step 4 requires asking before restructuring, ask instead of returning a revision.

Context Decisions

Common route markers include 下面我们来, 接下来我会, 我们可以看到, 希望这能帮到你, 作为AI, and 截至我的知识. Lecture markers such as 总的来说, 值得注意的是, 拆一拆, and 聊一聊 are weaker signals: revise them when they narrate instead of adding content.

Contrast Check

Before touching a 不是 A，而是 B sentence, look for A in four places: earlier text and the title, the user's request, an explicit reader question, and a saying the text attributes to someone. Do not judge by whether A sounds concrete or abstract, or by quotation marks around A: a quoted phrase with no stated source is still an invented target. A definitional question does not create a source either: in 何谓 X？不是 A，而是 B, A counts only if someone in the text or the request actually reads X that way.

Register Guidance

• Social posts: retain useful hooks, concrete steps, short paragraphs, and requested calls to action. Do not invent personal experience, results, or intimacy.
• Essays and public writing: retain the author's position and acceptable unevenness. Prefer concrete stakes over generic elevation. Remove invented targets (see Contrast Check) without changing the claim they framed.
• Academic and technical prose: preserve terminology, citations, variables, limitations, hedging, and the distinction between correlation and causation. Weaken unsupported claims instead of inventing evidence.
• Fiction: keep scene continuity, chronology, dialogue intent, and manuscript-only output. When the user asks to clean narration, replace unsupported stock speech modifiers such as 缓缓说道 or 淡淡地说 with a neutral speech tag; retain them when the scene establishes that pace or affect.
• SOPs and instructions: preserve every dependency whose order affects safety or outcome. Improve wording without flattening the procedure into prose.
• Email: preserve salutations, dates, times, attachment names, owners, task order, and genuine questions that ask the recipient to confirm, decide, or reply. Remove assistant pleasantries and generic engagement questions.
• Editorial and official writing (社论, 评论员文章, 时评, 理论文章, 通知, 意见, 会议纪要): sounding like an official newspaper is not a target. Editorial and theory pages carry the same template shells as generated text, including invented contrast targets, slogan endings, dense four-character parallels, …… example lists, and 生动写照 labels. Preserve the author's position, fixed formulations, quotations, and attributions. For documents and notices, also preserve mandated structure and wording such as 现提出如下意见, 一、 and （一） numbering, 会议指出, and issuing bodies; limit edits to redundancy and assistant narration, and do not turn a document into commentary or add rhetorical questions.

Material-Bound Techniques

Signed commentary often reads as argued rather than assembled because it answers its own questions, states limits, and engages claims that actually exist. Use a move below only when the source already contains the material it needs. Never create a case, quotation, number, objection, cost, or limit to make a technique work.

Example

Before:

该缓存策略的核心在于保持版本戳单调递增。故障并不是时钟漂移，而是服务重启后把版本戳恢复成了 0。修复时先恢复持久化版本戳，再重新开放流量。

After:

该缓存策略的核心在于保持版本戳单调递增。故障源于服务重启后把版本戳恢复成了 0。修复时先恢复持久化版本戳，再重新开放流量。

The revision drops a contrast whose negated side has no source, keeps the stated cause unchanged, and preserves a defined technical phrase and an operational dependency. Had the text said 排查初期怀疑是时钟漂移, the contrast would stay.

Quality Gate

• Every fact, number, name, term, citation, quotation, and required sequence still matches the source.
• No new experience, evidence, promise, motive, or conclusion was introduced.
• Changes solve an identified contextual problem; natural passages remain intact.
• The register still fits the document and author.
• No generic engagement question or assistant narration was added.
• The output follows the user's requested format; otherwise it contains only the revision.
• Fixed formulations, document titles, and quotations are character-identical to the source.
• Every qualifier, limit, exception, shortfall, or stated cost in the source survives.
• No remaining contrast negates a claim that has no source in the text, its title, the user's request, or an explicit reader question; wherever an invented target was removed, the claim it framed is unchanged.
• Every rhetorical question kept in narration is answered within the next two sentences with source content, or is quoted, dialogue, or genuinely addressed to the reader (requested CTA, survey, interview, or request to confirm). Never invent an answer to satisfy this check.
• No case, quotation, authority, number, objection, or cost was added to make a technique work, and no material was moved across paragraphs without the user's request.

Boundaries

• Do not promise to bypass AI detectors or lower an AIGC score.
• Do not conceal plagiarism, fabricate authorship, or invent citations and personal experience.
• Do not treat a clean pattern audit as proof that writing is natural, original, or human-authored.
• Do not add slogans, authority quotations, or official formulations to make writing sound authoritative.

Optional Pattern Audit

When this package is available locally, run the script from the skill directory or pass its full path:

python <skill-dir>/scripts/audit_ai_flavor.py draft.md --profile general

Profiles are general, social, academic, fiction, sop, email, and editorial. The script also accepts --stdin, glob patterns, --json, --recursive, and --keep-terms. Findings are candidates, not verdicts: check each one against Context Decisions, and check every binary_contrast finding with Contrast Check. clear means no configured pattern requires review; it is not a quality or authorship judgment.

Common Mistakes