Tighten a paragraph without losing your voice
Cuts filler from one paragraph while the meaning and the register survive, then lists every edit it made and why.
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Your prompt
Model-agnostic — works in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or any AI chat.
Why this prompt works
- →Asking for the changes to be listed after the rewrite makes the edit auditable — you can tell whether it improved the paragraph or just changed it.
- →"Keep the author's voice" is stated as an explicit constraint because tightening prompts default to a bland, corporate register otherwise.
- →The ambiguity clause stops the model from silently picking one reading of a vague sentence and rewriting confidently around that guess.
Part by part
- Keep its meaning and its author's voice
- The instruction that stops a rewrite becoming a replacement. Left alone, a model converges every paragraph toward the same neutral register.
- don't flatten it into generic prose
- Names the specific failure. Generic is what tightening produces when voice is not protected, and it is hard to notice until several paragraphs read identically.
- keep every fact and number exact
- Facts are the thing a rewrite quietly loses. A number rounded for readability is a factual change disguised as an edit.
- list what you changed and why
- Turns the output into something reviewable. Without the list you have to diff two paragraphs by eye to find out what was removed.
- say so instead of guessing at what it meant
- The guard against confident clarification, which is how a rewrite makes an ambiguous sentence say something the author did not mean.
Common mistakes
Make this paragraph better.Better is undefined, so the model applies its default register — shorter sentences, plainer words, and none of the author's voice. It reads competently and no longer sounds like anyone.
Rewrite this to be more professional.Professional is read as formal, which usually adds hedging and passive constructions. It is the opposite of tightening, and it makes the writing harder to read rather than easier.
Improve this and make it flow better.Flow is achieved by smoothing over the specifics, so exact numbers become approximations and precise claims become general ones. Without the fact constraint, that happens invisibly.
Questions
Why ask for the list of changes?
Because it is the only practical way to review the edit. Comparing two paragraphs by eye reliably misses a dropped qualifier or a softened claim, and those are exactly the changes worth catching.
Does it actually preserve voice?
Partially, and it is the instruction doing most of the work. Voice survives better in short passages than long ones, so tighten paragraph by paragraph rather than handing over a whole document.
What counts as filler worth cutting?
Throat-clearing openings, redundant qualifiers such as very and quite, and phrases like in order to that a single word replaces. What should survive is anything carrying a hedge that was meant.
Should I accept every suggested cut?
No — read the reasons. Some hedges are deliberate, and a model cannot tell a cautious claim from a wordy one. The change list exists so you can reject the ones that removed a meaning you intended.