I'll start by reading the skill brief and the files.

Pre-David pass — scene 29, "Birds go around a field"

Part 1 — does it make sense

"close enough together that the streams almost touched again in the middle air" — Part 1, a flat restatement that contradicts itself. The two streams are said to be "pouring along the boundary dykes" of a field on opposite sides; two lines a field's width apart cannot almost touch. Replacement: "two streams of birds pouring along the boundary dykes, a field's width apart and running level with each other,".

"two miles short of Ranner's Sluice ... in the last hour of the light" — Part 1, check the clock. Scene 28 has them at the plank bridge "at the middle of the afternoon" with Edwin saying "It's four miles to the Sluice." Two miles in three-plus hours is a stop, not a walk. Either make 28's remaining distance longer, or say here what they spent the afternoon on (a soil lesson on the verge, her thirty-one guesses becoming fifty). Replacement, cheapest: change 28's "four miles" to "seven or eight miles" and leave 29 alone.

"You taught me two columns this morning," she said. "Guess is a column." — Part 1, count/fact against the scene before it. The two columns Edwin ruled this morning were head and tilt — both of them guesses — so "Guess is a column" mis-describes his own lesson and the point she is scoring with it goes slightly soft. Replacement: "You had me rule two columns this morning and write a guess in both of them, before I knew anything. You said the honesty is the whole instrument."

"the landlady, who knew Edwin's face inside two hours by way of a cousin who had taken the course at the crossroads" — Part 1, the clock, plus viewpoint knowledge. They have just come in with the last of the light and supper arrives at once, so "inside two hours" is measuring nothing that has happened yet; and Edwin cannot know about the cousin at the moment the plate lands. Replacement: "and the landlady, who had placed his face before their packs were off — a cousin of hers had taken the course at the crossroads, and she said so while she was setting the plates down — set supper in front of them without being asked."

"the way starlings do at that end of a summer day" — Part 1, "that" with no antecedent. Replacement: "the way starlings do on a summer evening".

"And I'm putting a line under this one." — Part 1, two flat restatements and no way to choose: she is either underlining it for emphasis or ruling a line under the entry to close it off. Replacement: "And I'm underlining it."

"Guess, marked as one: quiet." — Part 1 (an explanation stopped halfway) and VOICE §2's rule that nobody answers with a word the reader has to decode. "Quiet" is the whole content of the guess and it is a code word on this page. Elaborate — give it a sentence, and let Peri ask, since she asks everything else: "…and then, in its own line: Guess, marked as one: that ground is quiet. / "Quiet how?" said Peri. / "Not dead. Not busy. The way a floor is quiet when the people have gone out of the room above it. It's a word and not a reading, which is why it's in the guess line." (Main session to check this against what the draft has already put on the page about the sample at home.)

"The field itself ... was nothing." — Part 1, the "nothing happened" note: three sentences of description follow. Replacement: "was nothing to look at."

"Forty years," said Edwin, to nobody in particular, "is evidently a long time in the kitchen of an inn," and paid for both suppers. — Part 1 twice over, plus Part 6. (i) The joke does not parse without 28: "forty years" is a bare callback to a carter the cold reader has never met. (ii) It does not quite parse with 28 either — the carter's claim was that the fish is better than the fowl, which fowl being served does not refute. (iii) The tag sits mid-phrase. Replacement: "'That was forty-year-old hearsay off a carter,' said Edwin to nobody in particular, 'and I handed it to you as if it were a reading. Mark it against me and put the reason next to it.' He paid for both suppers."

Part 2 — the gesture at meaning

"and said nothing at all, in a way that filled the whole table." — Part 2, a clause that announces significance and supplies none; and peri.md 3 says the count is her emotion meter and the narration must not then name the feeling. Cut the clause: "…found the guess column, marked it, and said nothing at all."

"in the shape flocks make when nothing at all is on their minds" — Part 2 / Part 6, an unnamed manner offered as a description; the reader cannot picture the shape. Replacement: "low and loose, the shape of a flock with nothing to get round."

"Not look at that: she had been watching the country all day with the second picture in her head" — Part 2 (oblique) and Part 6 (italicised phrase inside narration reads oddly). The distinction between "look at the birds" and look at that is a puzzle for the reader before the scene has given them anything. Replacement: "She did not say it the way people say look at that. She had been watching the country all day for the second picture, and she knew what she had before Edwin turned round."

"which surprised the fen" — Part 2, a flourish claiming an effect nothing has. Replacement: "which put a bird up off the dyke", or cut.

"there are eels in that water thinking about the dark" — Part 2, a figure that quietly overstates the instrument: it claims he hears intent, in a speech whose entire point is the limits of what he can hear. Replacement: "there are eels in that water and they're moving."

"the way a man can be pale and you would only notice it standing him next to his brothers" — Part 2 / Part 5 redundancy. The sentence has already said it plainly ("three shades quieter than its neighbours in a country where every field was green"); the simile restates it and adds a man being stood somewhere by somebody. Cut the simile, keep the plain clause.

Part 3 — the world

"Peri was still walking point" — Part 3, a figure from an army this world does not have (point man is modern military). Replacement: "Peri was still out in front".

Part 4 / Part 5 — character and device

redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replacement in her own grammar: "So it's worth less than a hit out of nowhere. I don't know how much less. That goes in too."

redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replacement: "I'm writing that I watched the whole day for it,".

"and people believe my voice, which is exactly why I don't lend it to guesses." — Part 2 and edwin.md 4/13: the most portable sentence in the speech is its last one, which rule 4 bans outright, and it is the scene's aphorism spent on a closer. Replacement, ending on the fact: "Anything I said about that field from here would be a guess, and a guess in my voice comes back to me in five years as a reading. So I'm not making one out loud."

"and when you've got fifty years of instrument-keeping behind you, it'll still be the right sentence." — Part 2, a second portable line eight paragraphs from the first, and it claims weight rather than saying anything. Replacement: "Write it exactly as you said it," said Edwin. "Word for word. That's the half of it most people never get to, and you got to it standing in a road." — or plainer still: "Word for word. I didn't have that sentence at your age."

"a written thing keeps" — Part 5, the device: it is a portable aphorism, and it is Peri's own construction from the scene before ("The answers keep. It's the questions that spoil") handed back to Edwin, which reads as her voice in his mouth. Replacement with the plain fact: "and a note with a date on it will still be there next spring."

"The field with the letter behind it, the farmer waiting, and the measured thing getting bigger by the month" — edwin.md 7a, the inventory pile joined by "and" (redacted's), and three compressed callbacks a cold reader cannot open. Elaborate: "There's a field a day and a half east of here that a farmer wrote to me about. Somebody has measured the bad ground on it twice, and it was bigger the second time. That field is where the work is."

"The bank's alive," he said. "The dyke's alive; there are eels in that water... The verge is alive under my hands." — edwin.md 4, anaphora: three clauses opening on the same word and frame. Replacement: "The bank's alive," he said. "So's the water — there are eels in it and they're moving. Under my hands the verge is doing what a verge does."

The landlady's cousin who took the course at the crossroads — Part 5, redundancy: scene 27 opened on a landlord whose grandmother took the course at the crossroads forty years ago. Same beat, same institution, same wording, two scenes apart. Vary it: the landlady learned the frost-sense off a teacher of his, or a nephew who went to Wystow; or have her recognise the staff rather than the face.

Part 6 — weak where it should be strong

"Edwin stood on the road verge, set the staff against his shoulder, crouched, and put both hands flat into the grass at the dyke's edge, and was still for a while." — Part 6: a chain of "and"s in a physical beat, and "was still for a while" names no duration. Replacement: "Edwin set the staff against his shoulder, crouched on the verge, and put both hands flat into the grass at the dyke's edge. He stayed down long enough for the light to go another shade."

Em-dash budget — five in 1,061 words, about 4.7 per thousand against a budget of ~2. Two of the five are in one Edwin sentence ("in two books — mine and yours — and…"); repointing that one to commas brings the scene close to budget.

The device a second round would be about: the aphorism cluster in Edwin's mouth. Four separate portable closers ("a guess wearing my voice / people believe my voice", "a written thing keeps", "it'll still be the right sentence", "with leave, in daylight, at the gate first") in a scene whose budget is one, and three of them fall at the end of a speech, which is exactly the shape edwin.md 4 names as a defect. Rephrasing them one at a time will not fix it — the scene is currently structured so that every one of Edwin's turns lands on a summarising line.