# Voice Preservation

## Capture before revising

Record five anchors from the supplied text: audience, formality, sentence rhythm, preferred concrete details, and emotional temperature. Add marked choices: dialect, fragments, humor, technical vocabulary, contractions, repetition, and punctuation.

## Revision rules

- Keep the author’s strongest specific nouns and verbs.
- Change one variable at a time when testing a new cadence.
- Do not replace every short sentence with a compound one or every plain word with a synonym.
- Do not add personal anecdotes or sensory detail unless the author supplied them.
- Preserve culturally meaningful idiom and nonstandard grammar unless the author asks for a different register.

## Compare, do not homogenize

After a revision, compare a representative paragraph with the source. Ask whether the revised version still sounds plausible from the same speaker and whether it now gives the reader a clearer reason to care or act.

## Useful prompts

- "Keep my dry, direct tone; only flag lines that make a claim I have not earned."
- "Make this warmer for a new customer, but do not add hype or invented outcomes."
- "Keep the fragments and em dashes in the dialogue. Tighten only the narration."
