Write for the ear

Every script gets judged read aloud. Not skimmed — spoken. This catches a category of problem that looks completely fine on the page.

The core constraint: a listener cannot re-read. Anything that requires a second pass is simply lost. That single fact generates all the rules below.

The rules

• THE COMMA TEST: a sentence with more than two commas is two sentences pretending. Split it. Aim for 15–20 words per spoken sentence, one idea each.
• ONE named third party per script. After that, every he/she binds to the last person named — a second name and the listener is lost.
• Kitchen-table verbs: "he Venmo'd me", never "he requests".
• No invented hyphen-compounds ("scary-good"). They read fine and sound wrong.
• Quoted text-speak ("wyd", "k") max once, early or mid — never the final beat.

Length is air, not compression

When a script needs to be shorter, cut story beats. Never speed up the telling. Scale by dropping or adding air, never by telegraphic compression — compression is how you end up with fragment-stacks, which is the thing that just capped your score.

One more thing worth knowing: the engine speaks at roughly 2.7 words per second regardless of what you do. Extra seconds become trailing dead air, not slower delivery. If it feels rushed, that's claim density, not speed — budget about one beat every five seconds.