Rendered from docs/obligations/0134-the-comment-prose-defines-by-contrast-979-times-in-179-000-words-and-no-mechanism-here-performs-an-editorial-pass.md in the Headwater corpus. Every document on this half of the site is typed by the taxonomy the descriptor names: corpus.json.

The comment prose defines by contrast 979 times in 179,000 words, and no mechanism here performs an editorial pass

Context

Issue #191 ran the check layer's own prose rules over engine/**/*.rs, about 179,000 words of comment prose and more than docs/spec carries. The two rules with a mechanical remedy, contractions and British spelling, were already met by habit, with zero violations across the whole corpus. The one rule the prose misses, the 25-word sentence limit, stays advisory because the remedy is a rewrite rather than a substitution. A passage from check/src/scope.rs stayed under that limit throughout and still read as hard, which is the case the issue built its argument on.

Obligation

The corpus owes an editorial pass over the worst of that comment prose, because the prose defines by contrast rather than by statement. rather than appears 979 times, about 5.5 times per 1,000 words. is what appears 397 times, and it is 237 times, and and never 196 times. which is what appears 123 times, and it is not appears 73 times. The prose also carries 428 inline quotations stitched into host sentences, 1,082 clause-introducing colons, and 215 em-dash asides. Almost every sentence carries a correction inside it, and each instance is defensible on its own. The aggregate is the problem, and no single instance is a finding a lexical rule could report. A worked rewrite of the check/src/scope.rs module header cut 211 words to 187, without dropping a claim. Mean sentence length dropped from 17.6 words to 11.7, and the longest sentence dropped from 36 words to 22. Q24 ruled readability out as a sweep class, because every sweep class names two things that disagree and a readability finding names one. The tic counts point to four files as the worst of it: cli/src/main.rs, check/src/scope.rs, check/src/cache.rs, and check/src/lib.rs.

Discharge

The docs/ half of this is already closed. #204 fixed the broken relative links, and headwater_check::fragment::comment_links now holds that rule, covering check/src/scope.rs and check/src/cache.rs. Three issues carry the rest: #201 for rustdoc-relative links, #202 for neighbourhood and centre against American spelling, and #203 for the remaining pass. This document closes when those three land, because the pass itself discharges the debt, not a new mechanism. No sweep class or check rule performs this work, since Q24 already ruled it outside what a sweep can confirm. ste-editor remains the only route to a rewrite that keeps every citation and every reason intact.