#+TITLE: Proposal — two correspondence patterns for the voice skill (prose mode)

* What this is

Craig taught two structural rules while I drafted a Signal reply for him on
2026-07-23. They aren't in the voice skill yet. He asked whether they belong in
=/voice personal=; I said no, because personal mode is publish artifacts only
(commits, PR titles and bodies, PR review comments) and email and Signal are
prose mode. Sending the proposal here since rulesets owns =voice/=.

I did *not* edit =~/code/rulesets/voice/SKILL.md= from the home session. The
=~/.claude/skills/voice= symlink points straight at the canonical, so a local
"stopgap" edit would have been an unflagged write into rulesets' scope. Home
carries a memory as its stopgap instead.

* The two rules, as Craig stated them

1. *Order by what matters most to the recipient*, not by what's easiest to
   answer or the order they wrote it. Their news outranks your logistics. A
   direct question they asked can sort *below* personal news they shared.
2. *Group each topic into one paragraph.* Everything on a subject goes
   together rather than fragmenting across several paragraphs.

* The worked case

His sister sent a long catch-up: 30+ lbs lost, a deep from-scratch cooking run
(sourdough, English muffins, tortillas, home-roasted deli meat), a mixer she's
considering, and one direct question about whether he subscribes to MasterClass.

My first draft opened with the MasterClass answer, because it was the only
explicit question, and split the cooking material across three paragraphs.

Craig reordered it: weight first, then one paragraph carrying the entire cooking
thread, then MasterClass, then the personal close. His framing was "start with
what would be the most important things to her."

The lesson is that leading with the easy answer reads as transactional, and a
topic split across paragraphs reads as a checklist rather than a person talking.

* The conflict that needs resolving in the same edit

Pattern #43 currently reads, in part:

#+begin_quote
Never merge short paragraphs into multi-sentence ones in a "clean prose" pass
(corpus: 41-74% of Craig's paragraphs are exactly one sentence, depending on
register).
#+end_quote

Rule 2 above is a merge instruction. Taken naively the two patterns contradict,
and a future run gets whipsawed.

They aren't actually in conflict, but the boundary has to be stated or the
skill can't act on both:

- *#43 governs an angle shift.* A one-sentence paragraph stands when the next
  thought moves to a different subject. Craig's openers and closers stay
  one-sentence, and they did in the final draft.
- *The new rule governs one topic that got fragmented.* Three paragraphs all
  about cooking become one.

Proposed formulation: same topic → one paragraph. New angle → new paragraph.
Whichever way this is written, #43's "never merge" line needs a qualifier
pointing at the new pattern, or it will keep reading as absolute.

* Scope

These govern *correspondence* (email, Signal, letters), which is narrower than
prose mode's current surface. Prose mode also covers journals, working notes,
and documents with no recipient, where "order by what matters to the recipient"
has no referent. Worth deciding whether that's a tag on the two patterns, a
sub-mode, or just a sentence in each rule.

* What I'd suggest, but rulesets owns the call

Two new prose-mode patterns, correspondence-scoped, plus a one-line qualifier on
#43 naming the boundary. Numbering and the profile entries are yours. The
=voice-profile.org= side wants the worked before/after above, since the
reordering is the whole lesson and it doesn't survive as a rule line alone.

* Provenance

home session 2026-07-23, drafting a Signal reply to Craig's sister. Home holds a
=correspondence-structure-rules= memory as its interim, marked as pending this
proposal.