Written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_24.purple_prose.md`. The completed audit:

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# Audit: Purple Prose & Show-Don't-Tell — Chapter 24 ("First Snow")

id: purple_prose | owner: claude | tier: risk
Target: `output/chapters/chapter_24.md` (current integrated text, 176 lines)
Focalizer: June Park (close third, past). June closes the book per READING_GUIDE §1.

## Method / lead reconciliation

Current text audited directly. Gate WATCH counts and the Codex Claude-tic audit are treated as leads, verified in context; false positives discarded by name.

- Criterion-1 banned sub-patterns verified ABSENT by search: no "rippled" / "like a stone" / "stillness shattered" / "cracked the silence"; no "changed everything" / "broke forever" / "held its breath" / "never be the same"; no "breath she didn't know"; no "load-bearing."
- The Codex Claude-tic audit (`chapter_24.claude_tic_audit.md`) is STALE against this text. Its line numbers align early (its line 57 = current line 57) but drift ~8 low by the close (its "line 149" snow span is current line 157; its "line 153" glare span is current line 161). Two of its quoted near-miss spans do not exist in the current chapter (search-confirmed zero hits): "Everything in between belonged to the two of them to keep" (its line 69; current line 69 is plain dialogue, "Nobody needs the rest") and "The painting didn't fix that. It wasn't trying to" (its line 101; current line 101 is "pity was the easier word…"). The chapter was revised — in the telling-reduction direction — after that snapshot. Its clearances were re-derived here from current lines, not inherited.
- Gate WATCH false positives discarded by name: `showcase` (diegetic event name on Ben's flyer and the chapter card's coda, not AI-vocab ornament); `carefully` (line 103, anchored to "at value," a painter-looking fact); `tightened` (line 101, literal hand-on-stretcher-bar action); `swallowed` (line 161, glare consuming snow — a value fact, not a throat/breath tell); `cold` (line 163, literal first-snow temperature at the sanctioned convergence); `guarded` (line 123, "guarded harder than her own advantage" = protected a secret, not a gaze descriptor); `finally` (line 5, temporal/calendar, not an emotional softener).

## Criterion verdicts

**1. Purple spans — CLEAN.**
Checked: banned ripple/stillness similes and misapplied-epic-tone tags (verified absent, above); adjective/abstract-noun stacks; all four flagged focus zones (snow, portrait, ledger, `After Class` reception).
- Strongest counter-candidate: line 49 — "felt her stop being a person in a room and turn into a person in front of a picture, *a different and more dangerous thing*." The appositive is the nearest thing to an inflated epic tag. It survives: this is the chapter's highest-exposure public beat (Ruth Kim is the one cohort member who reads the un-shared origin off the seam), so "dangerous" is proportionate to real stakes, not algorithmic importance; and the clause names a concrete perceptual shift a painter tracks — a viewer reorienting from socializing to reading a picture.
- Snow — excused explicitly (not flagged): line 157 "the fat slow kind that *can't yet decide if it means it*" personifies the snow, but READING_GUIDE §4 ("First snow — The clock made visible") and §6 ("the first-snow ending is the one sanctioned convergence") license the convergence, and the text re-literalizes immediately at line 159 ("It won't stick. Ground's too warm. It'll be wet by morning"). It stays weather, not feeling.
- Portrait (line 99) and seam (line 19): dense but not purple — every adjective names a visible value/edge fact ("the dark of her sweater against the dark of the wall, almost the same note, a half-step apart, the hardest edge there is to hold"; "a shoulder comes forward out of a shadow with no line to help it"; "not blended, not bridged, a join you could find from clear across the floor"). This is the earned painter register the guide grants June (§2 voice differentiation), not ornament conveying little. The "edge was harder than pity" pun (line 101) turns on a literal value-edge and is grounded in the re-look ("she looked at the half-step again. The shoulder came forward"); the metaphor reveals the perceiver rather than displaying cleverness. Held.

**2. Telling that restates implied meaning — TELLING (1 instance).**
- Line 153 — "He nearly said something and drank the idea instead, *and she watched it cost him and watched him pay it*, and she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying." Theo's restraint is dramatized three times in one sentence: "drank the idea instead" (the action) → "watched it cost him" (June's registration) → "watched him pay it" (restatement of the same borne cost). The third clause restates the second/first inside a constructed "watched it… / watched him…" parallel and cuts with zero loss.

Considered and excused (NOT orders):
- Line 103 — "That was the ache… He had looked at her like this, carefully, at value… while he was deciding for her what she could stand to know." Names the emotion, but this is the private climax of the portrait discovery; READING_GUIDE §2 permits direct naming "when the naming *is* the event," and the ache is immediately re-grounded in two facts (the painting is good; it is from week three). Held.
- Line 3 — "counted that, privately, as growth"; line 129 — "The shame came up fast enough that she could have torn the page for that alone." Each labels an interior state, but each is voice-true June dry self-assessment (§2; voice card: jokes at her own expense / self-rebuke) anchored to a shown act (the un-fanned cup tower; the torn perforation), not a free-floating weather report. Held.
- Line 129 — the Odile/Theo withholding parallel ("except Odile had done it longer and colder and would be answering for less… because she had put the proof on a page instead of in a sentence") synthesizes two beats rather than restating a dramatized one; allowable reflection under criterion 3. Held.

**3. Allowable telling (over-flag guard) — CLEAN.**
Checked whether any compression skipped a scene the reader needed or duplicated a showing.
- Strongest counter-candidate an over-zealous auditor would wrongly cut: lines 79–85, the room-emptying and CHECK-OUT logging in quick declaratives ("The room emptied fast after the plateau broke. Someone's sitter needed relieving. Sam had an early call. … They logged the work."). This is correct compression — departures the reader does not need to live through, momentum preserved into the two-hander and the ledger reveal. It duplicates no dramatized beat. Survives as proper telling.

**4. Sensory detail POV-bound — CLEAN.**
All sensory choice is June's painter-optical consciousness under pressure: coats "ranked… by value," "wet wool going near-black at the shoulders" (line 3); the scarf "reading a full step too bright" (line 4); "cobalt going almost green at the rim where the kiln had starved the glaze" (line 37).
- Strongest counter-candidate for a free-floating (non-POV) detail: line 161 — "It was falling there too; the glare swallowed it. She had to look where the street went black." This could read as authorial nature-writing, but it is exactly a POV-bound value fact — a painter registering that falling snow is visible only against dark, not against glare — and it is June's literal act of looking. Survives; it is the model case of the prompt's "lyrical only when it names a visible value/edge/light fact."

**5. Pressure-matched language — CLEAN.**
Reflective passages carry layered syntax (portrait, ledger); party and departure beats run short and functional; the close strips to concrete nouns and material cost ("eight hundred dollars due Thursday, and she went," line 175).
- Strongest counter-candidate: the portrait paragraph (line 99), the chapter's most ornamented stretch. Test — does the ornament contradict pressure? No: it is the reflective private peak, and each layered clause is a value/edge fact, not decoration; the metaphor reveals the perceiver (June reads the picture the way she would paint it). Survives. (The one over-balanced parallel in the chapter — line 153 — is booked under criterion 2 and not double-counted here.)

## REVISION ORDERS

1. **Line 153 — restatement / over-balanced parallel (criterion 2).**
   Quoted: "He nearly said something and drank the idea instead, **and she watched it cost him and watched him pay it**, and she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying."
   Failure: Theo's restraint is rendered three times (drank the idea → cost him → pay it); the third clause restates the first two inside a constructed "watched it… / watched him…" symmetry that, against June's compressive register, reads as drafting artifact.
   Fix: cut "and watched him pay it" → "He nearly said something and drank the idea instead, and she watched it cost him, and she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying." This keeps the action, June's single registration, and the dry payoff. If the two-phase reading (cost incurred, then borne) is wanted, de-parallelize instead of doubling — e.g., "…and she watched him pay for it and not show it," dropping "cost him." Do not keep both halves of the current parallel.

OVERALL: TELLING
