Most text that trained an LLM was written to stop a thumb. Your reader has already committed to an hour.
The diagnosis. Feed prose (Medium, LinkedIn, captions) must re-earn attention every twenty seconds, so it sells constantly: hooks, punchlines, one-line paragraphs, dramatic colons. A paper's reader is past the abstract and committed. Selling to the committed is noise; the committed want density and a voice that does not perform.
The move: pull in two directions at once. From simplified technical English take the skeleton; from the engagement register subtract the tells. The short-form rules:
style.py): banned words,
colon rate, paragraph shapes.
Don't over-apply. Full ASD-STE100 (aerospace's thousand-word controlled language) applied to Hamlet's soliloquy gives prose that is unambiguous, procedural, and lifeless. Apply the standard, but not too much.
Then rewrite the bridges. Left alone, LLMs write incomplete bridges: spans point the right way, joins are missing. Each generated draft in the paper got roughly an hour of human rewriting — unpacking compressed mysteries, adding the missing connective spans, saying plainly what jargon hid. Raw drafts are useful starts; no one should submit one.
Combines with: 4 — write to a grammar supplies the raw draft; 6 — assemble critics catches what the linter misses; 7 — pause and reflect schedules the human hour.