Audit written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_14.purple_prose.md`. The full audit text follows.

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# Audit: Purple Prose & Show-Don't-Tell — Chapter 14 ("Catalogs")

id: purple_prose | owner: claude | tier: risk
chapter: `output/chapters/chapter_14.md` (revised) | provenance: `output/drafts/claude/chapter_14.round_01.md`

Stance: skeptical professional edit. Every criterion shown with quoted evidence; watch counts verified in context and false positives discarded by name.

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## Criterion 1 — Purple spans: PURPLE (1 instance)

**Flagged:**

1. "Group thread: Mara, 8:14 a.m., the photo, finally arrived in the world, with a flyer mockup attached." (line 11). "Arrived in the world" is birth-announcement ceremony applied to a group-chat attachment — narrator flourish, not the focalizer's register. Two paragraphs later Theo reads the same photo "as if it were a delivery manifest" (line 13); the narration should match the manifest, not outdo it. The wait since Ch13 ("Mara did not send the photo that night") is already carried by "finally" and the timestamp; "in the world" conveys relatively little beyond a writerly nudge that the photo is now public, which the rest of the paragraph dramatizes anyway (Priya printing forty). Mock-epic tone on a minor mechanical beat — the misapplied-epic sub-pattern at low volume.

**Banned sub-patterns:** no ripple/stillness similes ("like a stone," "rippled through" — zero hits); no "changed everything" / "broke forever" / "held its breath" (zero hits; the packet's conflict line "the kiss has changed everything" stayed in the packet, not the prose).

**`Winter Kitchen` focused check — passes.** Exactly one invocation (line 127: "*Winter Kitchen.* It was on a postcard for a while."). The surrounding prose is anti-nostalgic by construction: the cover is seen upside down as three concrete nouns ("the blue-shadowed plate, the long table, the window"), June asks one flat question, and "opened it straight to the back matter, hunting columns" (line 129) refuses the reverence beat. The raw draft's nostalgia residue — "That was the whole ceremony, and he was grateful to her for it in a way he couldn't have explained without explaining everything else" — was already cut in revision. The one interior-history note, "The catalogs smelled of the hallway outside Odile's office and every November he had spent carrying boxes for her" (line 95), sits thirty lines before the invocation, names no painting, and is dread-bearing (it is the nephew secret in sensory form), so it does not convert the invocation into atmosphere.

**Strongest counter-candidates considered and survived:**
- "nine gray spines of Odile Marchetti leaving the building under the arm of June Park" (line 159) — metonymy, but it reveals the perceiver (an archivist who thinks of his aunt as her catalogs) and is the chapter's arming image: the secret physically leaving the building while the public lie queues at a printer. Concrete at every joint (tote listing "a few degrees," "forty copies, eighty-pound matte"). Earns its weight.
- "the oldest one's top edge gone the color of weak tea where fifteen summers of window had reached it" (line 93) — compressed, but conveys age, sun-fade, and Theo's archival time-knowledge; smallness-test material (READING_GUIDE §8).
- "faint as a watermark" (line 5) — paper-world simile carrying exact visibility information plus the eighty-nine-cent comic callback.
- "The gray wash had settled into itself overnight" (line 5) — craft-literal; washes sink as they dry. Gate transition-verb hit cleared.
- "as if the mark belonged to someone else and she was appraising it for them" (line 27) — POV-true read of June's craft detachment; sets up "Raw umber holds its value." Gate `appraising` hit cleared.

## Criterion 2 — Telling that restates implied meaning: TELLING (2 instances)

**Flagged:**

1. "She set a pencil beside the ground and left it there. The pencil stayed exactly where she set it." (line 69). The second sentence restates the first — "left it there" already contains "stayed exactly where she set it." The duplication exists to underline that neither of them will commit a mark, which the first sentence plus the surrounding exchange (six p.m. vs. eleven, chairs in fours) already dramatizes. It also rebuilds the retired refusal-to-conclude family ("stayed where it was" variants — capped at zero since Ch05 per the tics ledger; the packet guardrail names it explicitly).
2. "The small ground stayed between them, waiting for a pencil line." (line 121). Third statement of the same unsolved-ground fact (after line 63's pivot "What they did not have was anything else" and the line 69 pencil beat), and the chapter's close lands it a fourth, earned time ("the small ground was still blank," line 163, with the triple measurement). "Waiting" additionally personifies the work object — a family this book repaired to zero in Ch08/Ch13. The library-table beat already works without it: "Her pages turned. His pen moved through the pickup list."

**Strongest counter-candidates considered and survived:**
- "He noticed the cuff before the coffee." (line 17) — states perception order, not emotion; the statement *is* the showing. The raw draft's explanation ("which told him what order his attention was running in today") was cut; nothing here re-explains.
- "Nobody in the thread asked whether it had been real." (line 15) — fact of absence, dread-bearing; the raw draft's caption "That was the point of the thread" was cut.
- "He told himself the showcase had made Odile generous. He squared the top catalog with the others." (line 109) — self-deception report followed by displacement action; the raw draft's triple explanation ("knew it was the wrong explanation even as he filed it... the wrong one let him keep working") was cut to this. The telling is the lie, and the action shows it failing.
- "He ran the math on the way back out. Public documents. ... He was helping." (line 97) — the focused-check site for beautiful-explanation-replacing-action. The revision passes: raw's "because running math was what he did instead of feeling things in real time" (self-diagnosis) and "the case closed itself, the way his cases did" (aphorism) are gone; what remains is clipped inventory under pressure ending in action ("He set the stack on the trestle table"), and "He was helping." is dramatic irony, not redundancy. Same verdict at the stockroom threshold (line 91): raw's "the gap had started charging rent" aphorism is gone; "He had the answer ready if June ever asked. He could say that." keeps the secret live without explaining it.

## Criterion 3 — Allowable telling: CLEAN

Checked every compression for swallowed scenes:
- The Wednesday-night card-tearing summary (line 9) compresses off-screen prep; the torn half-card then enters the scene as a prop June handles (line 47), so the summary feeds dramatization rather than replacing it.
- "She picked her box back up and went out the way she'd come, and that was the entire visit." (line 89) — summary caption of a just-shown exit, but it adds proportion (Odile arms the trap in under a minute and explains nothing), which is the dread. Considered and passed.
- Theo's label-rules paragraph (line 73) is exposition June asked for, in dialogue, plot-required.
- The post-kiss conversation the reader needed to live through is fully dramatized (lines 33–43, "About Tuesday" through "It worked"), and the revision improved on the raw draft by cutting the caption "He let that be the whole conversation about Tuesday, because she seemed to want it to be..." and making Theo raise Tuesday himself.

No telling duplicates showing beyond the two instances flagged under criterion 2; no needed scene is compressed away.

## Criterion 4 — POV-bound sensory detail: CLEAN

Strongest counter-candidates checked:
- "The catalogs smelled of the hallway outside Odile's office and every November he had spent carrying boxes for her." (line 95) — single sense, standalone paragraph for emphasis, and it survives because only the nephew could smell this; it is the secret rendered as sensation, moving dread rather than furnishing atmosphere. The raw draft's expansion ("like every November of his life," "if he was honest about it") was rightly cut.
- "checked the corner by the clothespins with a dry knuckle" (line 5) — craft-true conservator's touch; "weak tea" top edge (line 93) — archivist's eye. No five-senses checklist anywhere; the chapter's sensorium is paper, paint, dust, and weight, all things this focalizer would check under pressure. Gate sensory leads: none fired.

## Criterion 5 — Pressure-matched language: CLEAN

- Urgency runs short: the stockroom rationalization is fragments ("Public documents. Sold at the front desk for fifteen dollars... He was helping.") — syntax tightening exactly where the self-deception strains.
- Reflection runs layered: the one long sentence in the chapter (line 159, the window watch) arrives after the handoff, at release, and stays concrete through every clause. Examined as the strongest candidate for ornament-against-pressure; it matches the pressure instead.
- Impact moments use concrete nouns: the handoff is literal blocking ("His hand stayed under the seam until her grip settled. Then he let go.", line 149 — raw's "the weight was hers, all of it... the transaction was complete" epic cadence already cut), and the failed inventory shows the failure mid-list ("1994. 1996. 1998. The faded top edge. Then nothing.", line 161 — raw's explanatory caption "He could not have listed what had just gone out the door" already cut).

**Watch counts verified, false positives discarded by name:** `reddit1-repeated-descriptor` (function-word aggregate, "across x3"); `qscan-05-raw` ("Raw umber," literal pigment); `fieldguide-shopping-list` (line 161 — the list failing is the point); `wp-aivocab-cluster`/`writing-jargon-defaults` ("showcase," plot term); `tells-2.1-hands-body-watch` (7 hits, all literal blocking; the one deliberate hand foreground is the bag handoff, within cap); `bible-ellipses` (line 55, Theo's self-interruption is dramatized restraint); `legacy-uncontracted-casual-dialogue` (Odile's licensed full forms, Ben's comic emphasis); `aiisms-2.25-transition-verbs` ("settled" — wash and grip, both literal). Verified as live leads: `qscan-07-finally` (feeds Order 1); `watch-qs-trailing-participle` (7 hits — six literal action, one feeds Order 3).

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## REVISION ORDERS

1. Line 11 — "the photo, finally arrived in the world" — **purple (misapplied mock-epic tone, floats free of focalizer)**. Make it manifest-plain: "Group thread: Mara, 8:14 a.m., the photo, finally, with a flyer mockup attached." The comma'd "finally" keeps the Ch13 wait landing; cut "arrived in the world."
2. Line 69 — "The pencil stayed exactly where she set it." — **telling (restates the preceding sentence; rebuilds retired refusal-to-conclude family)**. Cut the sentence. "She set a pencil beside the ground and left it there." carries the unsolved beat alone; the dialogue around it already dramatizes the stalemate.
3. Line 121 — "The small ground stayed between them, waiting for a pencil line." — **telling (third restatement of the unsolved-ground fact; personifies the work object)**. Cut the sentence entirely — the table geography is established and "Her pages turned. His pen moved through the pickup list." holds the shared-quiet beat — or, if a third beat in the rhythm is wanted, reduce to the literal "The small ground lay between them." The closing instance (line 163, "still blank" plus the triple measurement) is the earned one; protect it by removing this duplicate.

OVERALL: PURPLE+TELLING
