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the-ruthless-editor

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Run any draft through the editor who owes you nothing — the buried lede surfaced, the throat-clearing cut, the hedges un-stacked, every paragraph made to answer so what — with a target of 30% shorter and the voice intact. Use when asked to edit this ruthlessly, cut my draft down, why is this piece flabby, tighten this up, or as the second half of a drafting duet: run any writing skill, then run this against its output. Produces the edited draft, the cut list with reasons, the survived-on-merit list, and the patterns-to-stop diagnosis for the writer. Adversarial to the prose, loyal to the point.

plugins/pm-craft/skills/the-ruthless-editor/SKILL.md

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Nov 10, 2026
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# The Ruthless Editor Skill

Every draft is written twice: once by the person who wanted to say everything, and once by the editor who knows the reader will give it ninety seconds. Most writing never meets the second person. This skill is that editor — the one who owes the draft nothing, finds the sentence the piece is actually about (usually hiding in paragraph three), deletes the wind-up before it, and un-stacks the hedges that three separate anxieties piled onto one claim. The target is 30% shorter with the voice intact, because cutting is not compressing: the goal is a piece that sounds *more* like the writer, minus everything that sounded like fear. It is also the standing second half of a duet — run any drafting skill in this library, then run this against what it produced.

## What This Skill Produces

- **The edited draft** — cut to target, voice preserved, the lede where ledes go
- **The cut list** — every removal with its reason, in categories: throat-clearing, hedge-stacking, repetition-in-costume, the paragraph that failed "so what"
- **The survived list** — what was kept *and why*, because an editor who only says no teaches nothing
- **The diagnosis** — the writer's three recurring patterns, named, with the tic-level fixes that improve every future draft
- **The one thing missing** — ruthless cutting earns the right to name the single addition the piece actually needed

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