Study your existing writing

Analyze mode reads your past writing to discover habits, describe what they do for readers and ask which ones you still want. It records a full analysis and keeps the conversation manageable.

Prepare a useful set of texts

Choose texts you wrote, ideally separate works with different topics and dates. Include a few you consider good. Tell the agent which passages had coauthors or editors and which habits you no longer like.

Chapters from one book are one project. Revisions of a text and repeated analyses of it do not become independent evidence. Keep your holdout texts out of this set.

/vf-analyze explainer-en essay-one.md essay-two.md column.md one by one

Markdown, plain text, PDF, Word, a web page or pasted text can be sources if the agent has tools to read them. A scanned page or inaccessible file must be reported as a gap. There is no bundled PDF or Word extractor.

Read before comparing

The order matters:

Read every source in full and record coverage, including inaccessible parts.
Use the profile's brief as context, without first loading its rules and lessons.
Discover patterns and their functions, conditions, variation and counterexamples.
Compare with rules, lessons, earlier analyses and the other sources.
Label findings and draft candidate lessons.
Present decisions, then save only what you approved, alongside the full record.

Reading includes headings, tables, captions and how quotations are introduced. Statistical measurements exclude several kinds of non-prose and quoted material. A few extracted statistics cannot substitute for reading the whole work.

Look for functions, not a bag of features

A useful synthetic finding is “gives an everyday situation before the technical term, so readers have a picture before the label.” “Uses short words” alone does not explain where, why or with what exceptions.

The method examines architecture, reasoning, paragraphs, coherence, syntax, rhythm, vocabulary, narrator and reader, evidence, formatting and constraints. It maps findings to the nonfiction schema.

For each finding, the record keeps locations and short quotes, function, variation, conditions, exceptions, alternative explanations, recurrence scope and its relation to the profile. Recurrence is labeled passage, text, project, works or time.

A local pattern can justify a question; it cannot justify a lesson. Separate works support a stable habit. Works from different years can show that a habit lasts. A pattern's absence and functional variation matter too.

Keep the explanations distinct

Finding label	Interpretation
`stable`	Supported across separate works, with conditions and function described
`stated`	You say it is how you write
`genre`	A specific external requirement; belongs in the brief
`coauthor`	Only in material others shaped; ask before using
`old-habit`	Only in older writing; ask whether it still fits
`unsupported`	Too local or too little evidence; a question at most
`suggestion`	A convention you do not yet follow; you may choose to adopt it

A field convention you choose to follow can be your preference; an imposed venue requirement is a different explanation. Topics, factual beliefs and opinions are content rather than voice.

Decide in small batches

You can ask for one item at a time. Items have stable IDs: P01 for a passage, F01 for a finding, Q01 for a question and S01 for a suggestion.

A factual answer updates the source record.
“Yes, I do that” recognizes a habit; it does not approve a rule.
keep leads to exact lesson wording for your approval. It becomes a candidate lesson.
adopt leads to a full rule contract for approval.
unsure, later or silence saves no lesson or rule.

A candidate supported by analysis still needs training rounds before ordinary promotion. More analyses never replace those rounds. A direct rule is available when you deliberately state one and approve its whole block.

Pause, resume and inspect the record

/vf-analyze explainer-en resume

Resume starts from Decisions and Pending. You can say “show F07,” “reopen F03” or “list pending” during the conversation. Earlier decisions should not be asked again unless you reopen them.

The full record lives at profiles/<name>/analyses/<YYYYMMDD>-<slug>.md, inside your voice home. It includes Sources, Coverage, Measurements, Findings, Across sources, Confirmations, Inconsistent passages, Decisions and Pending. It is saved before the decision session and updated as you answer.

The schema validator checks profiles, not analysis records. Without file access, the agent returns the full record as Markdown and says that nothing was saved. Read the full analysis method.