# Audit: Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 13

Manifest entry: `output/chapters/chapter_13.md`, scene 01 (lines 2–159), 42 dialogue lines / 78 quoted utterances, doctor required. One scene block per manifest segmentation; loci cited by line.

Provenance note for the rewriter: the revision correctly removed the raw draft's worst offenses (the post-kiss "audited the kiss on craft grounds" paragraph, "under oath"/"settlement" legal figures, Mara's "Luis says Theo carries things before you know you're holding them" overread, "I will know"). But the revision pass *introduced* two of the findings below ("I overbelieved the screw," "It came out too thin to survive Mara's face") — neither exists in `output/drafts/claude/chapter_13.round_01.md`. This is polish drift added in revision, not inherited.

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## SCENE 01 — Week 5 studio, Marchetti Rooms (lines 2–159)

**1. VOICE CONVERGENCE: FAIL** — `"That sounds like both of you," Mara said. "I accept it temporarily." / "Temporarily is generous." / "I am known for it."` (Mara/June, scarf exchange, lines 23–27). After June's good evasion ("He gave me a fourth-floor window. I gave him a wall"), the exchange becomes three consecutive landed epigrams in which Mara adopts June's dry-correction rhythm wholesale. Mara's card: "warm, socially fluent… fills silence… avoid making every line a social punchline"; her sample register is "Take the scarf. I brought two." — explanatory warmth, not deadpan epigram. "I accept it temporarily" / "I am known for it" are also uncontracted mock-officialese (Rule 4: Mara is default-contract; the deadpan-formal defense collapses when three cohort members use the same move in one chapter — Mara here, Ben at line 103, Priya at line 131). This is rule 7 ("a conversation where every line lands perfectly is a written conversation") and the cut-list bullet "dialogue where every speaker has the same dry correction rhythm."

**2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM: CLEAN** — checked the scarf exchange, the canvas-reveal exchange (63–72), the After Class agreement (81–96), and the sidewalk negotiation (141–147). Strongest counter-candidate: `"This room," she said. "After class." / "You've never seen it after class." / "You have."` (June/Theo, line 85–89) — three short volleys of similar weight, but it survives because the lengths then break (Theo's "He took that practically first…" beat at line 91 interrupts with interiority and his next line changes shape), and the volley is statement-and-test, not question/answer ping-pong.

**3. MISSING INTERIORITY: CLEAN** — checked specifically through the photo/kiss sequence per the emotional-peak flag. June's mind stays lit at every pressure point: "Fine was going onto a flyer. Fine was going into the group thread…" (line 113); "Mara did not offer to take another preview. That was worse than persuasion. It meant June had already been given the useful facts, and any next move would be hers" (line 115); "The room did not disappear. She knew exactly where they were… That made it worse" (line 119). The focalizer does not go dark during the kiss; she gets more oriented. Strongest counter-candidate for darkness: the four-turn sleeve exchange at line 127 runs without interiority — it survives because it is two beats long and June's reaction arrives in the next paragraph ("found nothing there to fix").

**4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS: CLEAN** — checked every question in the scene: "Than what?" (39), "Do you need the card?" (47), "Closer?" (109), "Three?" (147), "Everything okay?" (155). All are genuine requests answered as asked; none manufactures portent. Strongest counter-candidate: `"Do you need the card?" June asked without turning` — survives because it is a real practical offer and Theo answers it with information, not atmosphere.

**5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM: FAIL** — the chapter uses the clipped echo-ratification pair three times: `"No title." / "No title."` (June/Theo, lines 93–95), `"Limit the list." "Three?" "Two." "Two."` (June/Theo, line 147), `"Tomorrow," she said. / "Tomorrow," Mara said` (lines 137–139). Once, this device is two people closing a deal; three times in one chapter it is stripped, untagged starkness performing significance (failure mode 5; rule 8 — each instance "lands cleanly" with zero friction). The third instance (Tomorrow/Tomorrow) is the earned one: it carries an actual granted mercy and a tag on each turn. The other two are rhythm-borrowing from it in advance.

**6. JARGON-TRADING WITHOUT TRANSLATION: CLEAN** — checked the craft vocabulary load (rigger, ground, sixteen by twenty, dead-salmon, primer). Strongest counter-candidate: `"One panel. One ground."` (Theo, line 145) — survives because "ground" is June's own card vocabulary, the shared-underpainting meaning was established in the Ch12 craft note, and the surrounding narration ("He put his keys in his coat pocket") carries the emotional weight so the term doesn't have to.

**7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY: FAIL** — two crammed multi-speaker paragraphs, one of them meaning-flipping. (a) Line 47: `"Do you need the card?" June asked without turning. "No," Theo said. "You can ask." His jar clicked softly against the shelf. "I know. I need thirty seconds without asking."` Typographic convention assigns "You can ask" to Theo (it sits in his tagged quote group) and the final utterance to June by alternation; sense requires the opposite (June offers, Theo declines and states the need). The follow-up "That was new" (line 49) only works if Theo owns "I need thirty seconds without asking" — the reader cannot determine this from the text. (b) Line 127: `"Old jacket," June said. "I have solvent downstairs."` — "I have solvent downstairs" sits inside June's tagged quote group but is Theo's line (he is the one with gallery solvent; June's next line rebuts him). Lines 131 and 147 use the same one-paragraph-many-speakers formatting; they happen to stay followable but are the same mechanism. This is the legacy failure list's mode 7 outright: the reader loses track of who is speaking at the exchange that carries Theo's most important line of the chapter.

**FAKE-SHARP: FAIL** — two loci. (a) `"I overbelieved the screw."` (Theo, canvas reveal, line 69). A coined epigram at the exact moment Theo should be embarrassed and practical — cut-list bullets "zingers that arrive at the moment a character should be… ashamed, ordinary" and "lines that sound quotable but not speakable." His card behavior when caught wrong is over-explanation collapsing into plainness ("I should have told you. I know that."), never wit-compression; the raw draft had the plain version ("It was off plumb. You said the left screw sat proud.") and the revision added the coinage. (b) The shot-order topper riff: `"Ten minutes, unless Ben's shot order contains surprises." / Ben said, "It does not." / "That is what a surprising shot order would claim."` (Mara/Ben, line 103). Setup, deadpan, topper — sitcom rhythm, banned by reading guide §2, with both speakers in uncontracted deadpan-formal against their default-contract cards. Spared after consideration: Ruth's `"Committee chairs,"` (line 109) — sharp, but it is her one editorial line for the appearance (style bible quota), it does the scene's social-proof work, and "category" is her card vocabulary; Odile's `"Empty rooms flatter badly."` (line 97) — quotable, but she is the sole character licensed for density and it is a two-word roster verdict, not a speech; Theo's `"…a subject that can hold both of us without pretending we see the same thing"` (line 81) — lands cleanly and is thesis-adjacent, but it is speakable, practical in intent, and his card grants him medium practical-to-emotional mass; the "Fine was going onto a flyer…" anaphora (line 113) is narration, not dialogue, and rates the photo, not Mara's wording — watch, not a finding.

**INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION: CLEAN** — tested rule 9 in the explaining direction. Strongest counter-candidate: "He did not perform surprise, or joke into her mouth, or turn the room into an audience they owed a shape to" (line 121) — a triple-negative list that flirts with explaining the kiss twice; it survives because each negation names a concrete move Theo declined and the paragraph ends in June's lived reaction ("June nearly laughed while she was still kissing him"), not a thesis. Interiority throughout reacts to exchanges rather than re-stating them.

**DIALOGUE-DIAGNOSIS (zero tolerance, reading guide §2/§6): FAIL** — `"Fine," June said. It came out too thin to survive Mara's face.` (line 21). Narration rating the delivery of June's own line — exactly the self-delivery caption shape the chapter packet bans verbatim ("avoid 'it came out flat/as inventory/careful'") and the reading guide bans in any speaker's mouth *or in narration about speech*, zero tolerance. The raw draft's version ("heard how thin that was") was the same defect; the revision re-clothed it instead of cutting it. Full sweep of the remaining candidates: "She moved on before June could decide whether that was useful" (41) rates usefulness of content, not phrasing — pass; "That was new" (49) registers a behavioral change, not sentence shape — pass; "He took that practically first" (91) characterizes processing, not speech — pass; "said something pleased and low" (77) is audible tone/volume, not craft diagnosis — pass; "That was true in the same limited way *boss* had once been true" (159) rates her own truthfulness, not delivery — pass. One hit, but the tolerance is zero.

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## FOCUSED CHECKS (per assignment)

- **Kiss fake-sharpness:** CLEAR. No one quips during or after the kiss; the scene work is carried by awkward action exactly as the card ordered — the wide arm holding burnt umber off the scarf, the dropped brush "bristles down," Theo "as grateful for the problem as he was horrified by it," the sleeve exchange in plain fragments. No applause, no clever line, no group debrief ("not available for group discussion" is narration doing aftermath, not a zinger).
- **Odile over-polish:** CLEAR, at the ceiling. Five strong lines ("Do not punish it for being ordinary," "Than when you liked it," the Brennan/Broadway logistics line, "Invite people you can stand in a warm room," "Empty rooms flatter badly") — all teaching or logistics, none a monologue, all within her exclusive density license. Do not add a sixth in rewrite.
- **Mara / Priya role drift:** Mara stays social, not oracular — "That sounds like both of you" is a light read on available data, and the raw draft's wise-NPC line about Theo was correctly removed; her residual problem is rhythm, not insight (finding 1). Priya's logistics relay (line 131) is justified — June literally missed the announcement — and "I am choosing not to be helpful about why" matches her card sample shape ("I am not rushing. I am optimizing badly"); she does not mirror Theo.
- **Theo/June post-kiss plainness:** CLEAR. Sleeve, solvent, "Right."; sidewalk talk is panel sizes and a two-item list; the offer text is neither decided nor disclosed ("Nia," June said — the withholding is visible as withholding). No implicit confession, no debrief.
- **Attributability / focalizer presence in the photo sequence:** interiority CLEAN (mode 3 above); attributability FAILS at lines 47 and 127 (mode 7 above).

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## REVISION ORDERS

1. **(resolves mode 1)** Rewrite the scarf exchange, lines 23–27. Quote: `"That sounds like both of you," Mara said. "I accept it temporarily." / "Temporarily is generous." / "I am known for it."` Keep June's evasion and at most one dry line for June; return Mara to her card register — explanatory, contracted, warm, the "Take the scarf. I brought two." shape. Mara may visibly decline to push (that is her social smoothing) but in her own filling-the-gap syntax, not an epigram volley. At most one line in the whole exchange may land.
2. **(resolves mode 5)** Keep `"Tomorrow." / "Tomorrow."` (lines 137–139) as the chapter's one echo-ratification. Break the other two: at lines 93–95, replace the second `"No title."` with action or a varied confirmation (Odile's approach with the roster can force the close); at line 147, collapse `"Three?" "Two." "Two."` so Theo's acceptance is carried by action or folded into his preceding offer — his card closes deals with usefulness ("I'll send two"), not stark echo.
3. **(resolves mode 7)** Re-paragraph all multi-speaker paragraphs to one speaker per paragraph: lines 47, 97, 127, 131, 147. At line 47, make ownership explicit such that June offers ("You can ask"), Theo declines and states the need ("I know. I need thirty seconds without asking") — "That was new" at line 49 depends on Theo owning that line. At line 127, give `"I have solvent downstairs."` its own Theo paragraph so June's `"Old jacket, Theo."` reads as the rebuttal it is.
4. **(resolves FAKE-SHARP)** (a) Replace `"I overbelieved the screw."` (line 69) with Theo's card behavior when caught in an error: brief over-explanation collapsing to plain admission — direction, not mandated text: something like "You said the left screw sat proud. I built the plate off the screw." The raw draft's plain register at this beat is the model. (b) Cut the topper from the flyer announcement (line 103): keep Mara's functional instruction and at most one of the two jokes — either Ben's deadpan `"It does not."` or Mara's setup clause, never setup-deadpan-topper. Restore default contractions to whichever survives unless the deadpan is the single retained joke.
5. **(resolves DIALOGUE-DIAGNOSIS, zero tolerance)** Cut `It came out too thin to survive Mara's face.` (line 21). Replace with observable action that shows the answer failing — Mara waiting with the brush off the canvas, Mara simply not resuming painting — so June's expansion ("He gave me a fourth-floor window…") is prompted by behavior, not by narration rating her own delivery. No substitute caption of any kind ("flat," "thin," "small," "didn't hold") on any line in the chapter.

Per audit policy, these findings route to the opposing model lane for rewrite; self-repair by the drafting lane is not an accepted resolution.

OVERALL: BLOCKING (5 findings)
