# Claude-Tic Audit - Chapter 07 Raw Draft

Audited text: `output/drafts/claude/chapter_07.round_01.md`

Mechanical input: raw gate report `output/critiques/codex/mechanical/chapter_07_raw_quality_gate.md`: 4 OPEN findings, 77 WATCH hits. Open hits were one-sentence paragraph gravity at raw line 10, em-dash density at raw line 18, banned echo-line poetics at raw lines 28 and 64. WATCH clusters pressed hardest: repeated descriptor, body/hands/eyes, trailing participles, jaw/face, raw/default emotion, and em-dash list structures.

- FOUND - tic 1 em-dash overuse - 22 raw em dashes / 8.8 per 1k, over cap - evidence: raw line 18, "Odile came through at seven with the panels — small gessoed paper boards"; raw line 48, "the blind contour from week two — his actual line, hers"; raw line 66, "Five rooms she'd shared with this man — a gallery..." - ORDER: reduce em dashes during integration, especially explanatory appositives that can become commas, colons, or separate syntax.
- FOUND - tic 2 shimmer prose - 4 instances - evidence: raw line 58, "Nobody laughed, which was its own kind of laughing"; raw line 64, "It was not a good painting. It was a true one, which was worse"; raw line 66, "for once the paint and the man agreed"; raw line 86, "the specific exposure of it" - ORDER: convert each to concrete scene consequence, paint problem, or June action.
- CLEAR - tic 3 mood verbs - checked for "mattered," "earned," "weighed," "carried" and adjacent mood verbs - nearest miss: raw line 90, "It's the one I had" - why it passes: the line is factual dialogue, not narrator mood certification.
- FOUND - tic 4 default-elegant noun phrase - 1 instance - evidence: raw line 58, "its own kind of laughing" - ORDER: cut; do not replace with another abstract elegance.
- FOUND - tic 5 habitual qualifiers / softening - 3 instances - evidence: raw line 30, "So it was a structural correction, really"; raw line 48, "Anyway. She didn't need it"; raw line 102, "long enough that June noticed the length and would, much later, think about it" - ORDER: keep June's defensive rationalization where it is active, but remove self-conscious smoothing and future-narrator shading.
- FOUND - tic 6 narrator-as-philosopher intrusion - 3 instances - evidence: raw line 12, "No model was the model"; raw line 64, "a true one, which was worse"; raw line 86, "not caught in a lie, caught in the truth" - ORDER: let the assignment, the painted details, and June's physical choices carry the thought.
- FOUND - tic 7 theme gloss after beat lands - 3 instances - evidence: raw line 64 labels the portrait's truth immediately after the paint has shown it; raw line 86 explains the social exposure after Theo recognizes the sweater; raw line 118 explains Theo's hidden panel as "whether it was hidden or just resting" - ORDER: replace glosses with observable action and leave inference to reader.
- FOUND - tic 8 recursive negation / false-profound reversal - 2 instances - evidence: raw line 64, "not a good painting. It was a true one"; raw line 74, "Not the scarf — anyone could do a black scarf. The knot" - ORDER: keep the scarf/knot distinction as practical visual discrimination; cut the abstract "not good/true" reversal.
- CLEAR - tic 9 self-aware meta-clause - checked for "if that was the word," "if there was a word," and equivalents - nearest miss: raw line 118, "as if deciding whether it was hidden or just resting" - why it passes the narrow tic but is still ordered under tic 7 because it glosses action.
- FOUND - tic 10 over-balanced parallel structures - 2 instances - evidence: raw line 78, "Both true. Both at once"; raw line 86, "not caught in a lie, caught in the truth" - ORDER: keep one compact recognition if grounded in the painting; remove rhetorical balance around truth/lie.
- CLEAR - tic 11 single-short-sentence profundity close - checked all scene and chapter closes - nearest miss: raw line 125, "She went and ate the clementine" - why it passes: this is an action that answers Priya's earlier care move and externalizes June's state; it should remain if not isolated as a profundity stamp.
- CLEAR - tic 12 lovely/quiet/small default register - checked "small/quiet/careful/lovely" and room tone - nearest miss: raw line 72, "Theo's panel was small work" - why it passes: the scale is literal; the chapter's register is awkward/exposed, not default-lovely.
- CLEAR - tic 13 physical reaction shortcut - checked for heartbeat, throat, breath, stomach, heat, flutter, and body-default intimacy - nearest miss: raw line 36, "She retied the scarf, which did not need retying" - why it passes: object action is exactly this book's allowed pressure register.

Book-specific additions:

- FOUND - zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis / phrasing-caption risk - 1 direct risk, 3 adjacent risks - evidence: raw line 106, Mara's interrupted "it's load—" touches the reading-guide-banned construction; raw line 58, "which was its own kind of laughing"; raw line 86, "caught in the truth"; raw line 120, "the question she actually had was not one..." - ORDER: remove the interrupted banned word entirely, cut conversational-caption prose, and keep questions/action literal.
- FOUND - refusal-to-conclude variants - 2 instances - evidence: raw line 16, "she had decided not to examine the new arrangement"; raw line 48, "the part she was declining to think about" - ORDER: replace with concrete avoidance behavior.
- FOUND - hand/body motif density risk - 4 body-object foregrounds beyond normal blocking - evidence: raw line 18, "palm-of-two-hands size"; raw line 62, "jaw edge"; raw line 68, "hands"; raw line 118, "both palms" - ORDER: keep only what painting mechanics require and avoid turning hands into the chapter's tenderness channel before Week 4.
- CLEAR - protected motif / reveal bans - checked for `Winter Kitchen`, first snow, family/nephew reveal, route-card replay, and out-of-town-offer leakage - nearest miss: raw line 116, repeated class-list naming procedure - why it passes: the list is needed for Theo's surname payoff and does not touch protected threads.

WATCH reconciliation: the raw gate's open findings all map to this audit's orders. The 77 WATCH hits include false positives on literal studio/body vocabulary, but the jaw/body cluster and em-dash/list clusters are meaningful because they accumulate in a high-exposure chapter. Integration must re-run the mechanical gate on `output/chapters/chapter_07.md`.

Chapter verdict: TICS-FOUND (10). Blocks acceptance until integration executes the orders and the final chapter gate/audits verify the repairs.
