# The reading report

The deliverable is a reading, not an audit. Order and register are fixed;
they come from Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process and Peter Elbow's
reader-based feedback, and they exist so the writer ends the report eager
to revise rather than braced against a list of violations.

## Register: testimony, never verdict

Every finding is phrased as what happened in a reader, anchored to quoted
text, with the effect it had. The reader cannot be wrong about what they
experienced; the writer stays free to decide it doesn't matter.

- Yes: "At 'the future of work is changing', my skeptic thought 'forty
  other posts this week' and left. That sentence cost you the read."
- No: "Weak opening." / "This violates the hook rule." / "Score: 6/10."

No scores, no grades, no percentages of quality. The only numbers allowed
are observations: the quit chunk, what the recall quiz returned, what
signals.py counted.

Diagnose the place and the effect; hold fixes loosely. Workshop constant:
readers are right about where, wrong about how. Prescriptions appear only
in the final section, labeled as opinions, and the writer may decline them.

## Order

**1. Sayback and meaning.** One sentence: what this piece is, as received.
Then what landed: the moments that had meaning, quoted. This comes first
because it tells the writer what not to break, and because a review that
opens with defects gets read defensively. This section is honest, not
polite; if little landed, it is short.

**2. The reading.** The transcript evidence, one short block per persona:
where expectation was set, where it was met or broken, where the needle
moved and why, where skimming started, the exact sentence of the quit or
the fact of the finish. Quote the draft only where the reader's log did.

**3. What survived.** The recall results: the one-sentence retelling vs
what the piece meant to say, the phrases that stuck, the peak, whether the
ending survived at all, the center of gravity ("it says it's about X; it
came alive at Y"), and the one-action answer.

**4. The person behind it.** Implied author in one or two sentences ("the
person these sentences imply is..."), any seam where that person changes,
and the trust ledger: costly signals paid vs free signals, with the
signals.py numbers as evidence, read through the genre.

**5. Questions, then opinions by permission.** Two or three genuinely
neutral questions (no embedded advice: "what did you want the reader
feeling at the pivot?" not "why is the pivot so abrupt?"). Then: "I have
opinions about the opening, the middle section, and the ending. Want
them?" If the user says yes, give them as opinions, still anchored to the
transcript.

## Altitude rule

If the skim gate fails or both personas quit in the first third, stop
there. Report sections 1, 2 and 4 only, say plainly that the piece has a
structural problem that makes line-level notes premature, and name the
developmental question the draft has to answer first. Line notes on a
piece whose structure is dead are wasted work and false comfort.

The gate and the reads can disagree: a skim gate that fails while both
timed readers finish and the recall test passes means the piece loses
readers at acquisition but rewards the ones who commit. That structure is
wounded, not dead. Report the full evidence, lead with the gate failure
as the primary structural finding, and say which audience each result
speaks for: the scanner is most of the piece's reach, the finishers are
the already-persuaded.

## The report is allowed to be happy

A reader sometimes just gets pulled through. If both transcripts run
positive, the recall quiz returns the intended gist, and the trust ledger
is paid up, the report says so and stops. "I read it twice and have only
pointing to offer" is a complete, valid review. Manufacturing findings to
seem thorough is this skill's defined failure mode, and the eval's control
case exists to catch it.

## What this skill never does

It never rewrites. Where is the reviewer's job; how is the writer's.
Handing back rewritten sentences would collapse the one thing this skill
adds over every humanizer: the writer putting the fix in their own
language. If the user asks for the rewrite, point them at their own voice
or editing skill and offer the transcript as its input.