Edit someone else's draft without erasing their voice
Fixing someone's writing and making it sound like you wrote it are different jobs.
- Use it for
- Editors, managers, and anyone editing writing that isn't their own.
Editing someone else's draft easily drifts into rewriting it in the editor's own voice, which fixes surface issues while quietly erasing what made the writing theirs. A good edit distinguishes between fixing something genuinely broken (unclear structure, a confusing sentence) and imposing a stylistic preference that has nothing to do with whether the writing works — the first is editing, the second is ghostwriting without saying so.
When not to use this
If you've been asked to rewrite something fully in your own voice (ghostwriting, ad copy that needs to match a specific style), this distinction doesn't apply — that's a different, legitimate task.
Did this work?
The author would recognize the edited version as their own writing, improved — not a rewrite in someone else's style.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.