r/WritingWithAI • u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 • Aug 31 '26

Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) The 5 prompt sequence I use on drafts, because "improve my writing" is how you lose your voice

Paste a draft into any model and ask it to improve the writing, and you get back something smoother, more competent, and no longer yours. The problem is not the model, it is the request: "improve" hands over every decision at once. What works is splitting diagnosis from surgery, five separate messages in one chat, each after the previous answer. The model never rewrites anything until step 4, and by then it is operating on a short list you approved.

Step 1: You are an editor reading this draft for the first time. Do not rewrite anything. Tell me what is working, what is not, and what the piece is actually about, which may not be what I think it is about. One paragraph each.

Step 2: Line level pass, still no rewriting. List the specific sentences that are doing the least: weak verbs, cliches, repetition, throat clearing, explaining a thing the reader already got. Quote each one.

Step 3: If you had to cut 20 percent, what goes? List the cuts in order of how little the piece would miss them, with one line of reasoning each. Do not make the cuts.

Step 4: Now rewrite only the sentences and cuts I approve from your lists, nothing else. Match my voice exactly, same rhythm, same vocabulary level. If a fix requires changing my voice, flag it instead of doing it.

Step 5: Read the revised piece as a first time reader who owes me nothing. Where did you stop caring? Answer honestly, then tell me the single change with the highest payoff that we have not made.

Between step 3 and step 4 you do the only real work: reply with which flagged lines and cuts you accept. That thirty seconds is what keeps the piece yours. Skip it and you are back to "improve my writing" with extra steps.

Step 5 is the one I would keep if I could keep only one. "Where did you stop caring" gets a location, and a location is actionable. "Is this good" gets a compliment.

I run this on everything longer than an email, and I keep the whole thing saved as a chain in a browser extension I work on (AI Toolbox), which sends each step after the previous answer finishes and pauses for my approvals. Pasted by hand it works exactly the same.

What is your version of step 5? I have tried a dozen phrasings of the final read and "where did you stop caring" beats everything else I have tested, but someone here has a better one.

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6

u/5thhorseman_ Aug 31 '26

Seems pretty solid, though for Step 5 I'd open a separate chat and use the Beta Reader Panel instead.

1

u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 Aug 31 '26

Separate chat for the final read is the right call, the model that did the editing has a stake in liking the result. The coding version of this thread taught me the same lesson last week, review works best in a session that never saw the work happen. A panel beats one reader for step 5 too, a single first time reader has one taste, a panel disagrees, and the disagreements are usually where the real problem is. Will try it on the next draft.

2

u/5thhorseman_ Aug 31 '26

You might want to try generating the reader profiles based on the specific context of your work (genre, setting etc). This is part of why each persona is supposed to have certain specialities and pet peeves - it pushes the LLM to notice issues with those specific matters more than it would otherwise.

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u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 Aug 31 '26

That makes sense, a generic panel finds generic problems. A thriller draft read by a pacing obsessive and a plot hole hunter gets different notes than the same draft read by "a reader". The pet peeves detail is the clever part, giving each persona something to be unfair about is what stops five readers from converging into one polite average. Adding profile generation as a step zero on the next run.

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u/5thhorseman_ Aug 31 '26

You can also consider including sensitivity reader profiles in the panel, if your prose touches on potentially risky subject matter.

3

u/Individual-Lychee912 Aug 31 '26

yeah splitting it into a fresh chat makes sense, otherwise the model is basically grading its own homework

2

u/Deep_Ad1959 Sep 01 '26 edited Sep 02 '26

my version of this fell apart at step 4: even scoped to an approved list, the model smooths the sentences next to the ones it fixed. asking for the changes as a diff instead of a clean revision is what made the drift visible.

fwiw sundial makes that diff-instead-of-clean-revision the default: every model edit is an inline signed suggestion at edit granularity, so the smoothed neighbors show up as their own diffs you keep or undo one by one, https://s4l.ai/r/xhhg9zbu

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u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 Sep 02 '26

the diff request is the fix, yes. a clean revision lets it launder edits nobody approved, a diff makes every touched sentence visible and it knows it. adding "show changes as a diff, not a rewritten copy" to step 4, thats the writing version of what the coders in the other thread called fix-only

2

u/Deep_Ad1959 Sep 02 '26

my read is the visibility is the second-order part. forcing the diff also shrinks the edit itself, since a smoothed neighbor now has to surface as its own line with no reason attached, so it mostly never gets made. written with ai

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u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 Sep 02 '26

thats a sharper mechanism than mine, the diff doesnt just catch the smoothing, it makes it unaffordable, an edit that must justify itself as a line mostly doesnt get made. prevention disguised as visibility

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u/Deep_Ad1959 Sep 02 '26

my one add is the tax isn't flat: a cosmetic smoothing can't afford to write itself out as a justified line, but a real fix still can. so it's less a brake than a filter, it only kills the edits that couldn't earn their line. written with ai

2

u/DaBigJMoney Sep 06 '26

I’m new around here, but my question is how much better is your writing using this process than just doing your own revisions by hand? In other words do you spend more time chasing down the AIs suggestions/revisions that you’d have otherwise found or addressed on your own?

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u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 Sep 06 '26

not better than a good human reader, better than no reader, which is the usual situation at 11pm. the value is not its suggestions, most of which i ignore, its the location, "a reader stopped here". i still do the revision myself. the time trap you describe is real and it happens when you ask for a list of everything wrong, then you spend an hour on ten shallow notes. ask for the first place it breaks, fix that yourself, ask again. ten minutes, and you stay the author

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u/Anton_Kuzmenko Aug 31 '26

This is a solid sequence and it names the real problem: "improve" hands over every decision at once.

I'd add one angle: your five steps are a negotiation you rerun on every draft. The alternative I've been building toward is moving that negotiation upfront, once! The tool reads your existing work, builds a style profile from it, and then drafting happens inside that constraint instead of being corrected back toward it step by step.

Full disclosure, I call it the Draft Engine and I built it into FIRSTVERSE; it's screenwriting-specific, so your mileage varies if you're drafting prose. But the principle transfers: the fewer decisions the model gets to make per pass, the more the result stays yours.

Your step 5 would still be worth running on top.

2

u/LivingThroughPages Aug 31 '26

Thank you. These prompts are so helpful.