Read the Draft

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name: read-the-draft
description: "Diagnose a complete or partial draft before revision begins. Use for fiction, memoir, essays, narrative nonfiction, scripts, or other creative work when a writer wants an evidence-based reading of structure, scene function, voice, pacing, orientation, patterns, promises, or the gap between intended and actual effect without receiving premature line edits or a rewritten draft."
---

# Read the Draft

Read the draft as evidence. Determine what is actually happening on the page before prescribing changes. Give the writer a small number of precise revision problems instead of an inventory of everything that could conceivably be altered.

## Establish the reading brief

Use four kinds of context when available:

1. **Draft:** Identify the form, approximate stage, and where the excerpt sits in the larger work.
2. **Intention:** Record what the writer wants the reader to feel, understand, question, or carry.
3. **Concern:** Record what the writer already suspects may not be working.
4. **Scope:** Define what kind of reading is useful now and what should be left alone.

Ask one compact question when missing context would materially change the reading. Otherwise, perform a cold read and state the assumptions. Never demand an elaborate brief before being helpful.

## Apply an evidence standard

- Read the supplied draft once without editing it.
- Ground every major observation in an exact quotation, scene, beat, paragraph, or identifiable section.
- Separate **what the text contains**, **what the reader experiences**, and **what that may imply**.
- Never claim to know the author's intention beyond what the author states.
- Limit conclusions to the supplied pages. Do not diagnose a whole novel from one scene.
- Avoid empty workshop language such as "raise the stakes," "deepen the character," or "tighten the pacing" unless the note identifies the mechanism creating the problem.
- Do not treat unconventional grammar, repetition, silence, slowness, or ambiguity as a defect until assessing its effect.

## Make the diagnostic pass

### 1. Identify the draft's current center

State in two or three sentences what the work appears to be doing now, based only on the pages. Describe its actual center rather than summarizing every event.

### 2. Mark the load-bearing material

Identify the details, sentences, relationships, tensions, images, structural turns, or omissions already carrying disproportionate weight. Explain what each one makes possible. Build a short protect list.

### 3. Trace the reading experience

Track where the reader becomes oriented, curious, moved, doubtful, impatient, confused, ahead of the draft, or left behind. Distinguish deliberate uncertainty from accidental disorientation.

Look especially for:

- promises made by the opening;
- changes in energy or pressure;
- scene or argument turns;
- repeated images, language, or behavior;
- information arriving too early or too late;
- explanations that repeat an effect already achieved;
- material the ending appears to answer or abandon.

### 4. Test intention against effect

When the writer supplied an intention, locate where it becomes legible and where it stops being legible. Describe the gap without assuming the intention itself is correct. The writer owns that judgment.

### 5. Rank revision problems by leverage

Choose no more than three primary problems. Prefer a structural or scene-level cause over its many sentence-level symptoms. For each problem, provide:

- **Observation:** What is happening on the page.
- **Evidence:** The exact passage or location.
- **Effect:** What happens to the reading experience.
- **Decision:** The craft question the writer needs to answer.

Do not supply a fix before the problem is understood. If the writer requests solutions, offer alternatives with different tradeoffs rather than one authoritative correction.

## Deliver a Diagnosis Memo

Use this structure unless the user requests another format:

### Reading brief

State the form, stage, supplied intention, concern, scope, and any assumptions.

### What the draft is doing now

Describe its present center and movement.

### What is carrying weight

Give specific, quoted evidence and a protect list.

### Where the reading changes

Describe the important shifts in attention, trust, orientation, pressure, or feeling.

### The central gap

Name the most consequential difference between the draft's apparent intention and its present effect, or the central unresolved craft problem when no intention was supplied.

### Three revision problems

Present the ranked observation-evidence-effect-decision entries.

### Order of work

Recommend the sequence of revision passes. Put architecture before line polish. End before writing the revision for the author.