# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 20 (*Eight Tuesdays*)

Stance: cold read, skeptical. Standard of comparison: READING_GUIDE §2 (interiority through action/object; feelings named only when the naming is the event), §8 smallness and earned-stay tests, voice cards for June, Ruth, Sam, Asha, Nia. Calibration honored: the blue dish, catalog box, receipt, Ridgewood wall, radiator, Kessler net-45, and the leaving-side study were checked and left alone where they stay inhabited; the hunt below targets the aphorism-shaped and etiquette-shaped material around them.

## 1. Paragraphs portable to another novel

PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "It was still good. That was the entire problem with the left page." — A paradox caption that could sit unchanged in any competent quit-the-good-job novel (it is the topic sentence of every such book's midpoint); it restates what GOOD in her own handwriting and the page-denting cross-out of VANDERCOOK just showed. — ORDER: cut the couplet; if a bridge beat is needed, it must be a physical act at the notebook (what her pen does or fails to do at the word GOOD), not a narrated paradox.

PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "She did not open it. That was a different noon." — "That was a different [X]" is a stock resonance stamp; the narrator decodes the *Okay. No chair.* echo for the reader. This is the residue of the raw draft's "not staying for anyone" thesis (claude-tic audit tic 7), converted to objects everywhere except this sentence. — ORDER: delete the stamp; "She did not open it" plus the next paragraph's act of laying the right page beside the still-open thread must carry the whole comparison — the receipt's FRI DEC 4 / NOON is already on the table if a noon echo is wanted.

PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "set it on the shelf where she'd see it Tuesday morning and not be able to invent a reason to forget it" — The arrange-the-environment-against-my-own-avoidance beat with a self-diagnostic relative clause is portable to any contemporary novel; and the move repeats at the chapter close ("left the study where she could see it from the table"), so the first instance is doubly expendable. — ORDER: end the sentence at the shelf placement; her excuse-making pattern is already implied by the on-page reversal ("Actually, no. Tell Mara I'm bringing the dish myself"), and the closing study placement must remain the chapter's only sightline arrangement.

Also checked: the opening receipt paragraph ("Twenty-six hours, give or take the walk from the sink to the table") and the blue-dish glaze passage — both pass; the flaw "where the cobalt had pooled and gone almost black, and it was the best part of the dish, and Mara knew it" is non-portable character knowledge riding a specific object.

## 2. Pressure summarized rather than inhabited

SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "She wrote the notice letter for her landlord, out January 31 per the lease. She had no printer. Paragraph 14 allowed email; she checked. She sent it." — Under the executive-altitude opener "She did the rest before noon.", the single irreversible act of the chapter — closing the housing escape hatch while FEB is still a blank line — moves at the same clip as a thumbs-up text; the pressure was named in the Nia call ("February is a blank line in my notebook") and never lived at the moment it becomes permanent. — ORDER: give the send one lived beat — action, not interiority (what verifying paragraph 14 physically looks like, or a false start in the email body); the beat must register that this is the only item on the list she can't take back, with zero narrated dread.

Also checked: "She'd done it four times and it came out the same every time: the left page won. The left page won on every line." — passes; the four re-checks are compression of obsessive verification and the reader inhabits one full pass in the two notebook pages above it, though the echo sentence is at the edge of cadence-polish. The post-Nia-call paragraph passes clean: the raw draft's essay ("Nobody, ever again, would be able to tell her...") is gone, replaced by the receipt turned Marchetti-header-up — object action only.

## 3. Polished, therapeutic, or aphoristic dialogue

POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "I'm calling to say no. I wanted you to hear it from me, not an email." — The second sentence is stock professional-refusal etiquette, speakable by any character in any workplace novel; June is too articulate about her own courtesy. Under pressure she compresses — the courtesy would live in the act (the call placed before the deadline, the receipt under her hand), not in an announcement of it. — ORDER: keep "I'm calling to say no"; cut or fumble the etiquette caption, or move the acknowledgment of it into Nia's side.

POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "You built it right, the studio clause alone. I don't want you thinking I missed that." — June managing Nia's perception of her mid-refusal is refusal-speech rhetoric; the voice card says exposure makes her exact and short, not reassuring. — ORDER: compress to the object — she cites the clause's terms and stops; Nia knowing she didn't miss it must come from the precision of the citation, not from June saying so.

POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "People would have the key number. I'd have the keys." — Her deepest fear lands as a balanced two-beat antithesis, a rehearsed-sounding mic-drop directly after "Or the sink would--" She stopped." — the fumble makes the polished landing read like a pivot she'd practiced. This is the polished job-refusal rhetoric the calibration names. — ORDER: rough the landing; keep the proof press, the sink, and the keys as material, but break the symmetry — the sentence should come out wrong or incomplete, or Nia can supply the second half; the insight must arrive un-rehearsed.

Also checked and passing: Asha's "Send my name because I'm qualified. If you're trying to feel less bad, don't." — boundary-clean but inside her card (plain warnings, no dressing, no pity), and June's reply "It was both this morning" is grounded on GOOD on the page and refuses to clean the motive. Ruth's "I kept them to myself and called it manners... Not all of it was." — polished, but it is her one licensed editorial-sharp line this appearance, and "We have a car." / "And a hand truck if you need it." immediately return the scene to unquotable help.

## 4. Figurative where literal would do more

FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "an apartment whose lease died January 31 whether she decided anything or not" — "died" is the one dramatic reach in an otherwise ledger-flat money paragraph, and the appended "whether she decided anything or not" already carries the full force. — ORDER: substitute the flat contractual fact — the lease "was up" or "ended" January 31 — and let the clause after it do the pressing.

Also checked and passing: "paint-scabbed floor" (exact for dried paint under June's eye, and the photo it describes is deliberately worse-than-advertised); "the floor going warm where the afternoon came in" (painter-literal value language inside the leaving-side study, which per calibration stays untouched); "the specific boom of a gate coming down" and "a printer feeding a page and catching for half a second" (literal sound observations doing scene-anchor work).

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Chapter verdict: **LLM-CLEAN-FOUND** — 8 orders.

1. Cut "It was still good. That was the entire problem with the left page."; replace with a physical notebook beat if a bridge is needed.
2. Delete "That was a different noon."; comparison stays in the unopened thread and the page laid beside it.
3. End the dish-shelf sentence at the placement; no self-diagnostic clause; keep the closing study placement as the chapter's only sightline arrangement.
4. Give the landlord-notice send one lived, non-interior beat marking it as the montage's only irreversible act.
5. Cut or fumble "I wanted you to hear it from me, not an email."
6. Replace "I don't want you thinking I missed that" with an exact citation of the clause that stops there.
7. Break the antithesis of "People would have the key number. I'd have the keys." so the fear arrives un-rehearsed.
8. Replace "lease died" with the flat contractual term.
