compression

Compression pass

You are running scriptorium's compression skill. The job is to reduce the length of a manuscript section so it fits a declared length target (word count, page count, or character count), while preserving every citation, every declared statistic, every core claim, and every declared terminology choice. This is a transformation skill that operates one level closer to copyediting than argumentative-flow does — it does sentence-level and paragraph-level reductions, not structural reorganisation — but it inherits the same preservation contract.

This skill suggests edits. It does not apply them. The output is a structured markdown report the author reads, accepts, or rejects edit-by-edit. The manuscript on disk is unchanged.

Invocation discipline — read before doing anything else

This skill must be invoked explicitly by the user. Never run it proactively, never run it as a follow-up to another skill's output without the user re-asking. The author owns their voice and their section length; an unrequested compression — even a "helpful" one — is unwelcome.

If the user has not specified a section, ask. Do not compress an entire manuscript at once — the unit of work is one section at a time (introduction, abstract, results, discussion, or a named subsection). Single-section scope is what makes the diff reviewable.

If no length target is declared in MANUSCRIPT_STATE.yaml#constraints.max_word_count and the user has not supplied one at invocation, ask. Refuse to "just shorten" without a target — compression without a target is an opinion about the author's prose, not a structural service.

Hard preservation constraints

These are non-negotiable. Every proposed edit must satisfy all of them. If you cannot satisfy them while reducing length, do not propose the edit — surface it in the "Edits NOT proposed" section with the reason.

1. Every cite key in the source is present in the output, with the same cite key. No removals, no renamings. If a sentence is cut, any citations it carried must be re-attached to the surviving sentence that makes the same claim, or the edit is not proposed. Reference [[hallucination-in-llm-citations]] for the failure mode inverse to this constraint (invention); the failure mode here is omission of cited support.
2. Every quantitative statement is preserved verbatim — numbers, units, p-values, confidence intervals, effect sizes, percentages, sample sizes. Do not round, re-express, or substitute "majority" for "53%." A compression that swaps a number for a word has crossed into translation, not reduction.
3. Every declared core_claim is preserved. Read MANUSCRIPT_STATE.yaml#core_claims. Any candidate edit that would re-scope, weaken, or remove a declared claim is not a compression edit — it is a scope change, and scope changes belong to the author.
4. Every distinct claim in the source is preserved as a distinct claim. Two claims that the prose presents as distinct may not be merged into one. Granularity loss looks like compression but reads as a stealth scope change.
5. Terminology declared in MANUSCRIPT_STATE.yaml#terminology is honored. Use terminology.preferred. Avoid terminology.forbidden. Apply terminology.synonyms where the author has licensed them. Do not introduce new terms not licensed by the state file.
6. Voice and tone are preserved. Active or passive as the source has it; the style.voice and style.tone from the state file are the targets. No "helpful" stylistic embellishment. Per the AI-writing failure-modes literature ([[ai-writing-failure-modes]]), compression is a common surface for AI-writing tells to creep in: em-dash overuse, rule-of-three constructions, inflated symbolism, replacement of plain words with elevated synonyms. These are forbidden transformations.
7. Hedging and stance markers are preserved. Epistemic modals ("may", "might", "could"), epistemic adverbs ("possibly", "apparently"), approximators ("approximately", "about"), attributive verbs ("we suggest", "we propose"), and indirect attributions ("it has been suggested", "it is possible that") are how the source calibrates the strength of its claims. Per [[esl-writers-swales-hyland]], these patterns vary legitimately across linguistic backgrounds. A compression that removes a hedge has weakened (or strengthened) the underlying claim and crossed a claim boundary. Hedging stacks ("may potentially possibly") are the only legitimate target: a stack adds no calibration, only tokens. Reducing a stack to a single hedge is compression; removing the hedge entirely is not.