japanese-cognitive-rhythm-writing

Flatness comes from writing every paragraph in the same cognitive mode, not from information density. Alternate observation, hesitation, assertion, and re-observation, and keep at least one unresolved question or unverified belief open so readers always have a reason to continue.

Run the five-step inspection: a topic test classifying each sentence as updating the situation or the document, a vocabulary leakage test, a tension ledger tracking open questions, a beat check for long assertion runs, and a boundary check for mid-text reader address. Then apply the symptom-to-prescription table.

The single criterion is whether a sentence updates the situation or the document. Sentences conveying events, data, or the narrator's judgment state are acceptable looseness; sentences only describing how the text looks or what comes next are filler and should be deleted or rewritten.

Yes. For explanatory texts without story scenes, the situation side means the subject's own properties such as data, trade-offs, and violated expectations, plus the reader's reasoning and counter-questions. Tension is built from the subject itself, not from narrating the document's progress.

Do not cut context-sharing sentences in introductions, such as scope, viewpoint, comparison axes, or open items, just to make prose shorter. That creates omission, not pacing. Density-increasing edits are only valid on top of already-shared context.