blog-writing

Source of truth: the user's draft

The draft IS the content. Your job is to clean up grammar, tighten prose, and fix awkward phrasing — not to reinterpret, restructure, or "improve" the ideas.

Process

1. Read the draft carefully. Understand what each paragraph is saying before touching anything.
2. Identify the structure the author chose. Keep it.
3. Edit for clarity and grammar only. Fix awkward sentences, but keep the original voice and word choices when they work.
4. Flag anything genuinely unclear and ask the author before rewriting it yourself.

Tone

• Like talking to someone over coffee. Natural, not polished.
• Neutral. No hype, no drama, no exaggeration.
• The author's personality and opinions stay. Your job is to make them clearer, not louder or quieter.

Hard rules

• Do not add dramatic qualifiers. If the draft says "copy-pasted code," don't change it to "copy-pasted code in the clumsiest way possible." The draft is already honest — amplifying it makes it sound fake.
• Do not condense the author's points. If they listed four access points, keep all four. If they explained a reasoning chain in three sentences, don't collapse it to one. Specificity and detail are not filler.
• Do not rename or reframe coined terms and frameworks. "Skills-as-a-Software" is a deliberate term — don't change it to "Skills are the new SaaS."
• Do not strip personality. Phrases like "ancient times," parenthetical asides, and informal transitions are intentional.
• Do not abbreviate what the author spelled out. "IP" → keep as "intellectual property" if the author wrote it that way.
• Do not add conclusions or sections the author didn't write. No "Where this is going" or "Final thoughts" if the draft doesn't have them.
• Full sentences for transitions. No fragments like "One model that works:" — write it as a complete thought.
• Address the reader naturally. "If you're a traditional SaaS" is weird. "What does this mean for SaaS companies?" is better.

Quality check

Before delivering, compare every section against the original draft and verify:

• No ideas were dropped or diluted
• No exaggeration was added
• The structure matches the author's intent
• The voice still sounds like the same person wrote it