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harness-tools/skills/document/unslop/references/packs/pack-voice.md
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2026-08-24 16:33:11 -04:00

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Pack: Voice

Use this pack for manufactured voice and the skill's own replacement tells. Do not report core phrase boilerplate or factual/register constraints.

Look For

  • Anti-slop register: bare fragment contrasts such as "Not the tool. The team."; forced punch endings; repeated two- or three-word sentences.
  • Elegant variation and synonym cycling that calls attention to itself instead of clarifying.
  • Dramatic fragments, binary contrasts, negative parallelism, colon reveals, and rhetorical setups.
  • Contrastive-definition tails ("X is a build step, not an output."), two-beat imperative slogans ("Emit tokens. Ship bytes."), repeated " that ." fragments, "One X, N Y." numeric parallelism, and abstractions that "ship inside" things.
  • Standalone slogan/spec fragment lines and headers: "N X, one Y." slogan cadence ("Four presets, one input.") and "N noun-phrase, past-participle ..." spec-sheet fragments ("Eight criteria, scored 1 to 5."). Flagged only when the whole line is the fragment; the same shape embedded in a sentence is a literal count and stays clean. Soft.
  • Headline slogan cadence: the "Short statement. Short statement." two-beat rhythm repeated across a document's headlines ("One command. A real URL." / "Reviewers click. The agent fixes."). One is voice; three or more is template grammar. Frequency-gated, soft.
  • Headline container agency: a calendar or program container delivers an artifact or outcome ("Week 1 ends with a calibrated eval"; "Demo day closes the cohort"). Name the completion criterion, mechanism, result, or decision instead. Literal boundaries such as "Week 1 ends on Friday" stay clean. Soft.
  • Tool anthropomorphism: an inanimate tool-noun given human agency. Reflexive self-agency fires anywhere ("The suite defends itself." / "The rules update themselves." / "It graded its own reflection."); strongly-volitional verbs (decides, hunts, wants, knows, believes, cares, refuses, judges, thinks) fire only on a standalone headline line ("The bench decides which model does which job." / "It hunts instances, not word lists."). Ordinary technical register stays clean ("the parser reads the file", "the model learns the distribution", "the test cleans up after itself"). Soft.
  • Punctuation performance: em-dash clusters, exclamation overuse, decorative bolding, title case inside body prose.
  • Warmth stripped into telegraphese: an email or narrative that loses natural softeners and sounds colder than the source.

Emit

Return JSON findings only:

{"span":"Not the tooling. The conversations.","rule":"anti_slop_register","pack":"pack-voice","severity":"hard","note":"Bare fragment contrast is the skill's own tell; rewrite as varied prose."}

Mark hard when the cadence is itself a recognizable formula. Mark soft when it may be genre-appropriate but needs review.

Examples

  • "Not the strategy. The execution." -> report anti_slop_register.
  • "We tested the API, fixed the retry path, and shipped." -> no finding.
  • "The result: alignment. The cost: trust." -> report colon reveal / fragment cadence.
  • "Thanks for sending this over. Could you send the figures by Friday?" -> no finding; natural warmth.