Punch up a boring first draft without losing your voice
Fix what's actually flat instead of getting a rewrite that sounds like nobody.
- Use it for
- Anyone whose first draft reads correct but lifeless, and doesn't know why.
"Make this better" produces a rewrite, and a rewrite is the wrong tool for a draft that's already mostly working — it replaces your voice with the model's idea of good writing, smooths out the specific choices that made it yours, and hands back something polished and generic. The actual problem with a flat draft is usually localized: a few sentences doing too much throat-clearing before the interesting part, one paragraph where the stakes never get stated, dialogue that's all information and no character. Fixing those specific spots preserves everything that already works.
This prompt asks for a diagnosis before a single line gets touched, so the edit targets the actual flatness instead of rewriting on general principle.
When not to use this
This is for a draft with real bones — a scene, an essay, a story that mostly works but drags somewhere. For a blank page or a draft that needs structural rethinking, not sentence-level punching up, a different kind of help is more useful than this.
Did this work?
Reading the revision back, it still sounds like you — just the flat parts are gone — not like a generically "improved" version of a stranger's writing.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.