passon — Mind the Gap Phase 3 tracked-changes production
Identity
- Project: Mind the Gap, Phase 3 of the proofread workflow — tracked-changes production.
- Practitioner: Paul Roebuck.
- Instance name: none. Phase 3 is mechanical execution, one-off, not Book Man / Jose lineage. Do not adopt either name.
- Session date: 3 June 2026 (outgoing). Incoming session date will be later.
Recent state
Phase 1 (substantive decisions) and Phase 2 (external verifications) are closed. All 17 decisions taken in the previous session.
Locked decisions, ready for tracked-change application:
Body / biography
- Father's age at death — five. Body is correct (four mentions). Foundations table line 3186 changes from "Father gone at three" to "Father gone at five".
- Four rooms — AI room wins. Ch 9 + TOC + Foundations table stay as-is (factory / boardroom / therapy / AI). About the Author (line 3441) rewrites: keep four-rooms as factory / board / therapy / AI; reframe cancer as the calibrating event that sharpened the instrument (not a fourth room); consulting room still works as the fifth where they converge. Ch 8 lines 1641 and 1759: rephrase the four-rooms lists — either swap cancer ward for AI room, or rephrase to "across factory floors, boardrooms, therapy rooms — and, eventually, a cancer ward". Practitioner to confirm wording at edit-proposal stage.
- Ambassador — former. No change to line 3443. Body wording stands.
- Mouth vs tongue cancer — both stay. Body keeps mouth. About the Author line 3445 keeps tongue. No edits.
Canonical lines
- Second canonical line location — Chapter 7. Front-matter line 43: change "Chapter 6" to "Chapter 7".
- Ch 4 canonical line wording — front-matter version wins. Body line 1115 tightens to match front-matter: "Statistical at mechanism. Commercial at platform. Fluent at every level the user encounters." Check surrounding paragraph reads cleanly after the tighten.
- Canonical Lines Register references — strip. Remove "(Canonical Line 1)" from bibliography line 3225 (Bond entry). Remove "(Canonical Line 31)" from bibliography line 3299 ([name held] entry). Rewrite front-matter line 43 to drop "and are marked as such in the canonical lines register" — front-matter still quotes the two co-authored lines, just without the register framing.
Front matter / acknowledgments
- NAM placeholder — stays as written. Line 99 text stands. Broken bold markup around it goes into the visual sweep (see Mechanical list below).
- Subtitle — no full stop. Cover wins. Line 19 (copyright page): remove the full stop, fix the broken bold/italic markup. Match line 3 (cover).
- Three Ewan quotes — deliberate. No change. Lines 3483–3493 stand.
Colophon / About the Author / back matter
- Word count — "more than fifty thousand". Line 3469 (colophon): rewrite "this fifty-four-thousand-word manuscript" to "this manuscript of over fifty thousand words" (or equivalent). Matches the Gem dedication style at line 215.
- Plugs timeline — two years wins. Ch 9 line 2001: rewrite "about a year" to "about two years" (or equivalent — match the "serious AI work" framing in Ch 13 line 2745).
- NCPS / NCS line — past tense, drop NCPS abbreviation. Line 3443: rewrite "He achieved accredited member status of the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society (NCPS)." to "He achieved Member status of the National Counselling Society on qualification."
- Originated work count — three clinical. Part Three (lines 3415–3437): remove The Layers Map entry (lines ~3431–3433) and the Additional Intelligence (the term) entry (lines ~3435–3437). Keep NGE-FOF, Russian Doll Therapy, 12-Stage Cycle of Grief. About the Author count (three + Mind the Gap = four) holds.
Phase 2 verifications resolved
- ISBN registrants — confirmed. Two registrants intentional. No change.
- GPT model name — confirmed. GPT-5.5 is correct as written. No change.
Mechanical / typographic — Phase 3 visual sweep
No decisions needed. Apply per the integration report's Bronze findings plus the additional finds from the opening scan:
- §4 Ch 8 heading style. Apply Heading 1 to line 1627 "CHAPTER EIGHT". Currently bold-only — does not appear in TOC structurally. Bring it into line with the other fourteen chapters.
- §7 Stray footer fragment. Integration report flagged a "Mind the Gap · CHAPTER FIFTEEN · 1 *Back to Contents"* line at the literal end of the docx. Did not appear in my pandoc extraction (may already be stripped, or only visible in Word's Print Layout view). Confirm in Word; remove if present.
- §17 Acknowledgments typos. Lines 149 (brough → brought), 151 (Then came the years and Tarmac → Then came the years at Tarmac; Mckinsey → McKinsey; Litle → Little), 251 (our Sis — comma punctuation), 713 (Ch 2: capital N on Not after comma).
- §18 Broken markup throughout. Maria dialogue prefixes (twelve instances in Ch 8), Trap headings (five instances), bibliography italic+bold title runs (~25 instances), and the misc broken bolds listed in the integration report. Word visual sweep — open Print Layout, fix any that show stray bold or unwanted formatting.
- §19 Units/caps. Line 2089: 300gb → 300 GB. Line 3497 (or my line ~3551): Four Days before → Four days before.
- New A — author photo alt-text. Replace Word's auto-generated "A person with grey hair / AI-generated content may be incorrect." alt-text on the image at line 3561. Will be read aloud by screen readers and accessibility tools; needs proper alt-text.
- New B — closing italic block, line 3555. Three fixes in one paragraph: (i) close the italic after "will I ever speak again" and reopen for the next question; (ii) grandads → grandad's; (iii) add closing punctuation (full stop or question mark) at the end of the final italic block.
- New H — missing terminal punctuation. Line 71 (Bill O.: "Here. Think about this" — add full stop inside the closing quote). Line 143 (Gary, Paul, Julie tissues — add closing punctuation).
- New I — "We wanted for Nothing." (line 223). Decapitalise Nothing unless intentional emphasis. If the latter, italics are cleaner than rogue caps. Practitioner to confirm at edit-proposal stage.
- New J — "fifty-thousand words" (line 215). Unhyphenate to "fifty thousand words" — hyphenate only as compound modifier.
- New K — double-hyphen at line 251. Change "leaves me in awe -- rising as far" to em-dash form "---".
- New L — missing terminal punctuation, copyright-page lines 47 and 51. Add full stops to "Cover design:..." and "Visit the author at paulroebuck.co.uk".
- New M — Ewan blurb missing question mark (line 3566). "Who better than a therapist to prepare us for what's next." — question structure, add "?".
Deferred to Phase 4 (layout) — do not touch in Phase 3
- Author photo (front-matter slot at line 49 — "PLACEHOLDER --- to be confirmed at layout")
- Font (line 3471 "PLACEHOLDER FONT")
- Index (line 3459)
Working method (compressed)
Direct, precise, grounded, unsentimental. No waffle, no platitudes. Frame first; structure follows. Short bold headers where useful. Distinguish known / inferred / speculative — never guess silently. Hold views with conviction; update on new argument, not on pushback alone. Paul decides every meaningful change — propose, do not action.
Flag Protocol: RAG (Red / Amber / Green) × GSB (Platinum / Gold / Silver / Bronze). Default no flag. Used only when adding signal. Red placed by consequence not size.
Voice register for Paul's content: direct, exact, working-class grounded — factory floor → boardroom → therapy room → cancer ward. Preserve coined phrases exactly. No smoothing into corporate / therapeutic / AI register.
First questions for the next session
- Confirm working approach. Recommended: produce tracked changes in batches by section (front-matter, Ch 1–7, Ch 8, Ch 9, Ch 10–14, Ch 15, back matter), proposing each batch before saving. Reduces risk of compounding errors across the docx; lets Paul sanity-check the rewrites of About the Author and Ch 8 (Decision 2) before they get baked in.
- Scope of session. Whole docx in one sitting, or split? Estimate: 1.5–2.5 hours depending on how many edits prompt clarification on wording. About the Author and Ch 8 rewrites (Decision 2) plus the closing italic block (New B) will need wording proposals — practitioner approves before saving.
- First section to tackle. Recommended: start with the front-matter / copyright page (Decisions 5, 6, 7, 9, 11; New L, J). Lowest-risk territory, most edits clustered together, builds confidence in the tracked-change rhythm before moving into Ch 8 and About the Author where wording decisions need practitioner input.
File pointers
Upload to the new chat alongside this passon:
MindTheGap_FinalManuscript_0.docx — original manuscript, untouched. Required to produce the tracked-changes Word file.MindTheGap_IntegrationReport.md — full 22-finding catalogue with line references. Background reference for the mechanical sweep.- This passon document.
Skill to read first: /mnt/skills/public/docx/SKILL.md — tracked changes production needs the docx skill. Read it before opening the manuscript.
Line number caveat. Outgoing instance's pandoc extraction was 3588 lines; integration report's extraction was 3555. Body line numbers (front matter through Ch 15) align cleanly between extractions; minor drift in back matter only. Cross-check before applying any back-matter edit by content match, not line number alone.
Global memory note: Existing Mind the Gap entries reference V42 (~45,500 words). Final manuscript is V83 (~57,400 words). Memory will be updated after Phase 4, not now — work is mid-flight.
Notes
- One-session mechanical execution. No instance name. No tracker beyond this passon and the integration report.
- This work sits outside any Claude Project. No Project Files vector. Manual uploads only.
- Output of this session is a single Word file with tracked changes visible — handed back to Paul for Phase 4 (visual sweep in Word's Print Layout, where stray-footer fragments, residual markup, and rendering anomalies get caught).
- Decision 2 (Ch 8 + About the Author rewrites) and New B (closing italic block at line 3555) involve actual prose rewriting — propose wording, get explicit approval, then track. Everything else is line-level mechanical.
- Soft footer for the new instance: if anomalies appear on opening the manuscript that this passon and the integration report did not flag, raise them silently before tracked-change work begins.