# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 11 ("Categories")

Stance: cold read, skeptical professional editor. Inputs verified: chapter text, Claude round-01 provenance, Codex initial assessment + Claude-tic audit + integration audits, voice cards, reading guide + `reading_guide_bans.tsv`, dialogue scene manifest (ch. 11 = one scene, lines 2–147, 56 dialogue lines), mechanical gate report (open=0).

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SCENE 01 (manifest scene 01, lines 2–147: Aiello Frame & Glass, Orchard Street → street door of Marchetti Rooms → empty studio; speakers June, Dom, Ruth, Sam, Ben, Priya):

- **1. VOICE CONVERGENCE: CLEAN** — covered attributions and read the full scene blind. Lexical fields stay separated: Sam owns space/access ("Me," Sam said. "Rivera. I carry." / "Sit. Not symbolically. The stool beats pacing."), Ruth owns minimal exactness ("Abbreviate." / "Mine."), Ben runs long and anxious ("I checked the walk to the J. Twice, which I know is not a personality."), Priya is brisk-practical ("The bedroom fits the actual bed… I could walk to work in nineteen minutes"), June is optical ("Fourth-floor north light is real light."). Strongest counter-candidate: four speakers land the same flat two-beat correction cap — Dom's "I'm not charging you the dollar. It's the principle of the dollar," Ben's "It has three tabs," June's "Cargo just gave it," Priya's "It's a good label." It survives because each cap is sourced differently (shop principle / self-aimed anxiety / deflection-exit / de-escalation), blind attribution still works, and the chapter carries a large mass of unquotable functional lines (the form-filling, the handoff). The rewriter executing the orders below must not add more caps of this shape; the chapter is at its ceiling.
- **2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM: CLEAN** — checked the three Q/A-dense stretches. Strongest counter-candidate: the five-line form volley "Same address, if there's a claim?" / "No." / "Then whose number?" / "Mine." / "Both." — it survives under Rule 7 because it is literally a form being filled at a counter, the lines carry unequal weight (Sam's "Both" overrides Ruth), and the volley breaks into action ("Ruth wrote both. June creased the kraft…"). Elsewhere question/answer lengths vary (Ben's long lease reads against Priya's clipped replies).
- **3. MISSING INTERIORITY: FAIL** — "'Application window closes Monday at five p.m. …'" through "'It's a good label.'" (Ben/Priya/Sam/Ruth, lines 79–108, Aiello shop). For roughly 420 words of the lease exchange the focalizer's mind goes fully dark: between "Sam dragged the stool back out" (77) and "June, who had been quietly building the walnut frame its second layer of board" (109) June registers nothing — no perception, no action shown in real time, no lived relation to the content. This violates Rule 9 ("A dialogue scene where the focalizer's mind goes dark is a scene the reader cannot enter") and it is the worst possible stretch to go dark in: a couple arguing about whether to sign a lease, in the POV of a woman whose own lease ends mid-December and whose unanswered out-of-town offer ("Nia's last message sat where it had sat since Thursday") is in her coat pocket. The chapter card requires "June implicated by analogy"; the lease analogy never touches her on the page — the closing interiority routes everything through the pickup question only. The retroactive "had been quietly building" concedes she was acting the whole time without showing any of it.
- **4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS: CLEAN** — tested every question for position-smuggling. Strongest counter-candidate: Ruth's "One thing… Dom's second line. If the ticket had said PARK, who picks up for you?" — it survives because it is a genuine, answerable, practical question built from a form both women just handled; June's dodge is then made visible *as* a dodge ("she'd meant her answer as a dodge"), satisfying the plain-speech floor's followability requirement. Ben's "Can I read an email out loud in a store. Is that allowed." is statement-punctuated but is comic permission-asking, not portent.
- **5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM: CLEAN** — the stripped runs ("No." / "Then whose number?" / "Mine." / "Both.") are earned transactional starkness at a shop counter, with attribution recoverable and June's taping interleaved immediately after; the scene does not perform bleakness it hasn't bought. Strongest counter-candidate: "Me," Sam said. "Rivera. I carry." — survives because it answers Dom's broken-off form question and matches Sam's card register.
- **6. JARGON-TRADING WITHOUT TRANSLATION: CLEAN** — checked rider, guarantor, occupant/leaseholder, AUTH. "The gilt pair's on the rider" is weighted by "Insurance wants the second line filled"; "Income forty times rent, or a guarantor at eighty" is weighable from the application-hurdle context; the load-bearing term "occupant" is explicitly translated by Sam: "An occupant can't renew… the occupant negotiates from the hallway." The reader can weigh every term used.
- **7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY: CLEAN** — strongest counter-candidate: the unattributed "Quiet cost us six hours." (line 65). It survives because only Sam owns the six hours (established at line 53) and Ruth answers it by name two lines later ("I'm not arguing the six hours, Sam"). The Dom/Ruth/Sam triangle at the register and the four-way lease exchange both stay trackable on a covered-attribution read.
- **FAKE-SHARP: FAIL** — "At the hospital, the line wasn't an opinion. It was the desk answering me or sending me back to the chair." / "At HR, the same line became a demand for utility bills," Ruth said. / "Quiet cost us six hours." / "It did." (Sam and Ruth, lines 61–67, Aiello shop). The two testimonies that precede this run are exactly what the chapter needs — gallbladder, six hours, sister in Annandale, notarized affidavit, flower in the subject line: people handling practical facts. Then the scene makes them re-deliver their own cases as a matched point-counterpoint: parallel "At the hospital…" / "At HR…" frames passing the shared abstract subject "the line" between speakers like a debate baton. That is the cut-list's "exchanges that exist mainly to deliver a compact aphorism" plus Rule 7 (every line landing = written conversation, not spoken); two people who lived these events do not summarize them back at each other in co-constructed parallel syntax. The recap also forces June's line-69 interiority ("Dom's form existed so that the right person could act when acting mattered. The same line could also be read by everyone in the building…") to explain the same dialectic a second time. Survivors I tested and declined to flag: June's "It doesn't lie at noon and it doesn't quit at three" (solicited — "One true thing about it" — card-licensed precise praise, immediately self-deflated); Priya's "five hundred a month makes being scared look responsible" (a rehearsed-in-life position stated plainly, direct want following: "I want to sign it on a day I'd sign it anyway"); Ben's "The rest is formatting" (zinger at a scared moment, but his card documents jokes as his fear response and it arrives *after* "And I'm scared we lose it," not instead of it); the "Cargo's allowed an opinion" / "Cargo just gave it" volley (within the 60%-banter calibration, deflection visible as deflection).
- **INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION: CLEAN** — the scene as a whole is not stripped: June's mind is present at line 69 (the mixed-gray registration, "She did not volunteer this"), line 111 (the photos recalled before the light verdict), and lines 143–145 (the deleted correction and the cubby reckoning). The localized blackout is ruled under failure mode 3, not here. Strongest counter-candidate for the over-explaining direction: the line-69 paragraph half-doubles the Ruth/Sam dialectic; this is a knock-on of the FAKE-SHARP recap and is handled inside Revision Order 1 rather than counted twice.

FOCUSED CHECKS (chapter-card and book-specific):

- **THESIS DIALOGUE (Ruth/Sam): FAIL** — covered by the FAKE-SHARP finding above. The hospital/HR/forms/boxes material itself passes (concrete, dated, costed); only the parallel recap run turns the speakers into chapter-argument spokespeople.
- **BANNED ABSTRACTION ("privacy and cover are not the same thing"): CLEAN** — searched for the exact sentence and paraphrase-equivalents. Nearest candidates considered: Ruth's "I'm saying the other version has its own waiting room" (asserts naming-has-costs, not privacy≠cover) and June's narration "Dom's form existed so that the right person could act… could also be read by everyone in the building" (two-edged-form, not privacy≠cover). Neither states or implies the privacy/cover distinction; the card's reserved Ruth line is not pre-spent. No hit in dialogue or narration.
- **DIALOGUE DIAGNOSIS (zero tolerance): FAIL ×2** — (a) "And the case for," Priya said, "since you've rehearsed it." (line 81). "Rehearsed" is explicitly named in the reading guide §2 ban list; Priya captions Ben's forthcoming delivery instead of showing her knowledge through what she does with it. (b) Narration, line 125: "in the particular way she had of stopping before a question instead of after one" — narration characterizing the rhythm/placement of Ruth's speech act; §6 makes narration-about-speech a defect "in any form," and the clause also pre-loads portent the question doesn't need. No other instances found: "Ruth had matched it with twenty years of her own" processes content, not phrasing; "she'd meant her answer as a dodge" is self-intent, and the deflection-made-visible the floor requires.
- **PRIYA/BEN LEASE SPEAKABILITY: CLEAN** (except the "rehearsed" caption, ruled above) — they sound like a tired couple, not a staged debate: the exchange is interrupted by gloves, the stool, and a two o'clock shift; it ends unresolved ("We'll talk tonight. Set your fourth reminder."); both are right enough; the reminder labeled "don't push" is couple-shorthand, not a panel discussion.
- **JUNE PLAIN-SPEECH FLOOR: CLEAN** — "That's not a vote. I'm cargo." (direct fact, present, verbatim); "Depends what's broken" (present; the dodge is then named as a dodge in her own interiority, keeping it followable); the group-text correction *he wasn't* typed and "deleted... letter by letter" (present; the deletion is the beat, and what she sends instead is plain fact). Floor met for every principal: Ruth "That was my answer for about twenty years," Sam "I wasn't on the form. That's the whole story," Priya "I want to sign it on a day I'd sign it anyway," Ben "And I'm scared we lose it."
- **SAM VOICE CARD: CLEAN** — warm-direct, space/access language throughout: "I carry," "Put 'authorized,'" "Sit. Not symbolically. The stool beats pacing," "the desk answering me or sending me back to the chair," chair/room/hallway vocabulary, choir at noon. No moral-lecture register; their pressure on Ruth stays inside the recap-run finding, which is a structural problem, not a register one. Contraction policy honored (default-contract). Ben's uncontracted "is not a personality" is card-verbatim emphasis (Rule 4 exemption; gate logged it WATCH only).
- **RUTH SHARP-LINE ALLOWANCE: FAIL** — Ruth lands two pull-quote-shaped editorial lines in one appearance against a cap of one (style_and_voice: "Ruth gets at most one editorial-sharp line per appearance"): "To certify the category, we'd have had to go out and become it first." (line 59) and "I'm saying the other version has its own waiting room." (line 67). Not counted as sharp: the flower-in-the-subject-line email (concrete-comic), "That was my answer for about twenty years" (plain confession), the PARK question (question, practical).

REVISION ORDERS:

1. **FAKE-SHARP / thesis recap (lines 61–67).** Quote: "At the hospital, the line wasn't an opinion. It was the desk answering me or sending me back to the chair." / "At HR, the same line became a demand for utility bills." / "Quiet cost us six hours." / "It did." Failure: parallel point-counterpoint re-delivering testimony already given; cut-list bullet 1 and Rules 7–8. Rewrite direction: break the parallelism and the recap. Sam may keep at most one concrete consequence line in their space register (the desk/chair content is card-true; "Quiet cost us six hours" may stand — it is nearly Sam's card line and is anchored to the literal six hours). Cut Ruth's matched "At HR, the same line became…" construction entirely — her line-59 testimony already carries that content — and let her reply move the scene instead (the folder, the receipt, or straight to "I'm not arguing the six hours, Sam"). Then trim June's line-69 paragraph so it reacts rather than re-derives: cut "Dom's form existed so that the right person could act when acting mattered" (Sam's case restated); keep the mixed-gray registration and "She did not volunteer this."
2. **Ruth sharp-line cap (lines 59 and 67).** Quote both: "To certify the category, we'd have had to go out and become it first." and "I'm saying the other version has its own waiting room." Failure: two editorial-sharp lines against a card cap of one. Rewrite direction: keep the waiting-room line (it closes the beat and is anchored to Sam's literal waiting room); flatten the line-59 epigram into Ruth's factual register — the affidavit list (notarized letter, joint accounts, shared lease, utility bills) already proves the point, so end that account on the withdrawn form and the sympathy email, e.g. plain statement that they didn't have those documents and weren't going to acquire them for HR. No new epigram may replace it.
3. **Missing interiority during the lease exchange (lines 79–108).** Quote the dark stretch boundaries: from "'Application window closes Monday at five p.m.…'" to "'It's a good label.'" Failure: focalizer's mind dark for the full exchange (Rule 9); the chapter card's "June implicated by analogy" never lands through the lease thread. Rewrite direction: insert one or two short June beats (a sentence or two each) inside the exchange, rendered materially per her card — the tape, the board edge, the photo of the half-window, the word "occupant" — registering her lived relation: her own lease ends mid-December and Nia's unanswered thread is in her coat. Perception first, judgment second; do not name the theme, do not anticipate the cubby reckoning at line 145, and do not let the beats explain the Priya/Ben argument back to the reader.
4. **Dialogue diagnosis, spoken (line 81).** Quote: "And the case for," Priya said, "since you've rehearsed it." Failure: reading guide §2 zero-tolerance — "rehearsed" captions Ben's delivery; the ban names this exact word. Rewrite direction: Priya invites the case without rating his speech — through behavior or shared fact in her brisk-kind register (she already owns "I saw the spreadsheet. It has tabs."); e.g., a plain prompt for the case-for, or a reference to how long he's been building it on the walk from Suffolk. The replacement must not relocate the caption into narration.
5. **Dialogue diagnosis, narration (line 125).** Quote: "in the particular way she had of stopping before a question instead of after one." Failure: §6 — narration characterizing the rhythm of Ruth's speech; also manufactures portent before the PARK question. Rewrite direction: cut the clause. The physical beat already present ("Then she stood still a moment, looking at June over the top of the bundles") does the work; if more is needed, extend the stillness materially (scarf, bundles, street), never as commentary on how Ruth asks things.

OVERALL: BLOCKING (5 findings)

Resolution path per audit spec: route orders 1–5 to the opposing model lane for rewrite; self-repair by the drafting lane is not an accepted resolution.
