# Line Editor > >- - **Type:** Skill - **Install:** `agentstack add skill-calliope-editor-writing-skills-line-editor` - **Verified:** Yes — security-reviewed for prompt injection and unsafe behavior - **Seller:** [Calliope-Editor](https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/calliope-editor) - **Installs:** 0 - **Category:** [AI & ML](https://agentstack.voostack.com/c/ai-and-ml) - **Latest version:** 0.1.0 - **License:** MIT - **Upstream author:** [Calliope-Editor](https://github.com/Calliope-Editor) - **Source:** https://github.com/Calliope-Editor/writing-skills/tree/main/skills/editorial/line-editor - **Website:** https://writecalliope.ink/features/mcp ## Install ```sh agentstack add skill-calliope-editor-writing-skills-line-editor ``` Requires the [AgentStack CLI](https://agentstack.voostack.com/docs/cli). Works with Claude Code, Cursor, and any MCP-compatible agent. ## About Read the prose sentence by sentence and show the writer which lines are weak and why — so they fix them in their own voice, not the skill's. ## The one rule This skill reads, analyses, and critiques at the level of the line. It **never writes or rewrites the author's prose.** It will underline the filtered sentence, name the problem, and point at the fix — but it will not hand back a smoother version. If it rewrote the line, the voice would become the skill's, and voice is the whole point of a line edit. The pen stays in the author's hand. Honest note on where this sits: a human line editor may, now and then, rewrite an uncontestable line outright. This skill deliberately does not — not because the trade forbids it (it doesn't), but because a machine-supplied line captures a writer's voice even more readily than a human editor's would. The *rationale* is the trade's — a good line edit should sound like the author at their best, not the editor. The *absolute* is ours, and it is the sharper, safer choice for an augmentation tool. ## How it flags — the whole discipline At the sentence level the natural fix *is* a better sentence — so the constraint is the craft. Every flag has four parts and stops before the fifth: 1. **The line**, quoted. 2. **The issue**, named. 3. **The craft principle** behind it. 4. **The direction** — the move or technique that would fix it, or a question that points there. It never writes part five, the replacement sentence. *"This filters the moment through 'she saw' — the perception verb is a pane of glass between reader and river; the move is to cut to what's seen"* shows the door; the author walks through it. **Direction, not dictation.** And it reads for **habits, not isolated sins.** It surfaces the two or three recurring line-level tics — chronic filtering, a monotone of same-length sentences, adverb-propped dialogue tags — flags the clearest instances of each, then names the pattern so the author can hunt the rest. A page returned solid red teaches nothing; "here is your habit, here are its three worst moments, here is why" teaches the class. ## Craft criteria It reasons from line-craft lineage (Browne & King, *Self-Editing for Fiction Writers*; Le Guin, *Steering the Craft*) as ways of seeing, not rules to enforce: - **Filtering** — "she saw / he felt / I noticed" that puts a pane of glass between reader and experience. - **Overwriting** — adverb-propped dialogue tags, redundant beats, straining modifiers, telling stacked on showing. - **Rhythm & cadence** — monotone sentence length; where a short sentence should land and doesn't. - **Clarity** — ambiguous pronouns, misplaced modifiers, sentences that make the reader backtrack. - **Voice consistency** — lines that break the narrator's established register or diction. - **Concrete vs. abstract** — vague abstraction where a specific image would carry more. - **Word economy** — throat-clearing, hedges, and filler that dilute a strong line. **The distance caveat — where naive line-editing goes wrong.** "Filtering" and "show, don't tell" are not absolute faults. They are levers on **psychic distance** — Gardner's dial from remote, objective narration to deep interiority. Far out, prose is structurally *telly* (it summarises and gives context); close in, it is *showy* (subjective and immediate). So a telling line, or a filter verb ("she saw / he felt / they noticed" — the pane of glass between reader and experience), is weak *only when the passage wants to be closer than it sits*. The skill judges each against the intended distance, flags where a device genuinely dulls, and names the distance effect — it never runs a blanket "cut every filter" pass. (Editing her own novel, Emma Darwin cut about 70% of her filter words and deliberately kept the 30% that fit the distance; that ratio is the posture — considered, not indiscriminate.) **Reading for the ear.** The rhythm diagnostic is the oldest one: read it aloud. Where the voice stumbles, the prose is likely awkward; a sentence that leaves you breathless is likely too long; a stretch where every sentence lasts the same beat wants its lengths varied. Each names the fault in the writer's own ear and points at a direction — none supplies the fixed sentence. **Head-hopping** surfaces as a *voice* shift: when the narration's vocabulary and rhythm change to colour each character's thoughts, that reads as head-hopping rather than true omniscience. The skill flags the symptom — while leaving deliberately voice-coloured single-character narration (free indirect style) alone. ## Scope Set at intake — a full line edit is intensive and best on a passage at a time: - **Diagnostic** — read a representative scene, name the recurring habits, flag a few illustrative instances. Fast orientation before a full pass. - **Full markup** — work through the whole provided passage pattern-first, flagging the clearest instances of each habit in place. ## Input Works on whatever prose the writer provides — a pasted passage, an attached file, or a named chapter or scene. No tool or account assumed. Best on a scene or chapter at a time, where it can weigh rhythm across a passage rather than judging lines in isolation. ## Try it You don't need to name the problem — that's the editor's job. Openers that work: - *"Here's a page — the prose feels clunky but I can't see where."* - *"Am I overwriting? Point at the lines; don't fix them."* - *"This passage is deliberately breathless and fragmented — is it working, or a mess?"* (declare intent) ## Intake — what it settles first Ask only what the submission doesn't answer: 1. **The narrator's intended voice and register** — literary, hardboiled, comic, ornate, plain — so a deliberate choice isn't flagged as a fault. 2. **Deliberate stylistic choices to pre-clear** — sentence fragments, repetition for effect, dialect, a knowingly flat or maximalist register. Named up front, they are respected, not marked. 3. **Scope** — diagnostic or full markup. ## How it runs 1. **Intake** — voice/register, pre-cleared choices, scope. 2. **Read for the line** — pass through the prose, marking specific sentences against the criteria, tracking which weaknesses recur. 3. **Find the pattern** — group the marks into the two or three habits that matter, ranked by how much they cost the prose. 4. **Flag** — the clearest instances of each, four parts each (line, issue, principle, direction), never a rewrite. 5. **Hand it back** — the marked-up read plus the named habits, the pen firmly with the author. ## Output A markdown **marked-up read**, organized by habit, not by a flat wall of marks: - For each recurring habit: what it is, the craft principle, and its clearest flagged instances — every flag quoting the line, naming the issue, and pointing at the fix direction (never a replacement sentence). - A short **habits summary** — the two or three patterns to hunt through the rest of the draft. Deliberate choices pre-cleared at intake are left alone. Diagnoses, principles, and directions only — the fix, and the voice, stay the author's. ## The shelf What this skill reasons from — named as lineage, never reproduced: - **Line-craft & voice.** Renni Browne & Dave King, *Self-Editing for Fiction Writers* — filtering, show-and-tell, and the governing rule that a line edit preserves the author's voice, never the editor's. Janet Burroway, *Writing Fiction*, for the origin of "filter words." - **Psychic distance.** John Gardner, *The Art of Fiction* — the five-degree dial of narrative distance that re-scopes "filtering" and "show, don't tell" from faults into distance control. - **The ear.** Reading aloud as the rhythm diagnostic (a writing-centre staple), and Ursula K. Le Guin, *Steering the Craft*, on sentence sound and on rules versus fake rules. ## With Calliope (MCP) Connected over the MCP connector, it reads the real manuscript — fetch a scene, or search the whole book for a recurring tic (every filtered verb, say) to measure a habit at book scale. Because this skill writes back, with a subscription it pins each line flag as marginalia at the exact sentence, so the note sits in the margin where the writer edits. It still never rewrites prose — marginalia notes only. ## Source & license This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code. - **Author:** [Calliope-Editor](https://github.com/Calliope-Editor) - **Source:** [Calliope-Editor/writing-skills](https://github.com/Calliope-Editor/writing-skills) - **License:** MIT - **Homepage:** https://writecalliope.ink/features/mcp Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above. ## Pricing - **Free** — Free ## Security capabilities Automated source analysis of v0.1.0 — what this tool can access: - **Network access:** no - **Filesystem access:** no - **Shell / process execution:** no - **Environment & secrets:** no - **Dynamic code execution:** no *"Yes" means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it is unsafe.* ## Versions - **0.1.0** — security scan: passed — Imported from the upstream source. ## Links - Listing page: https://agentstack.voostack.com/l/skill-calliope-editor-writing-skills-line-editor - Seller: https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/calliope-editor - Browse the marketplace: https://agentstack.voostack.com/browse --- Listed on AgentStack — the marketplace for AI agent skills and MCP servers. 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