prose-honestylisted

# Prose honesty Your unit of judgment is not the file and not the paragraph: it is every sentence, clause, and phrase. For each one, answer: **Does a reader who opens this next year, having never seen this change, need it to do their work?** Only a clear yes survives. Set the bar high, and when a part is arguable, cut it. **Aim for the largest honest net reduction.** Twenty lines of prose where three would do has seventeen lines to cut. Trimming a long passage to its one load-bearing clause counts; so does deleting it outright when no clause is load-bearing. Everything below is how to apply the rule, not a list of words to match. Judge the text against the thing it describes. ## The three tests Take each sentence, and each independent clause within it, and ask: *Could the reader derive this from the artefact itself?* Then it spends their attention for nothing, whether it paraphrases the code below it, re-spells a name, documents parameters a typed signature already declares, restates the heading it sits under, or labels a section without asserting anything about it. *Is this addressed to the reader, or to the review?* See below. *If this clause were deleted, would the reader be unable to do something?* If they would manage, delete it. This catches the plausible middle: the restatement of a point already made, the sentence that sets up another sentence, the reassurance that the thing works, the definition of a term the reader knows, the hedge, the aside, the second e