Revise without breaking your citations

The most expensive edits happen last. A late rewrite tightens a sentence and quietly drops the citation that made it defensible, or sharpens a hedge into an overclaim its source never supported. The Proof Reader is designed so that cannot happen: revision here is citation-locked by construction, and any claim whose wording changes is re-checked before it lands.

It has two modes for two jobs. Suggestions makes small, surgical edits you accept one at a time. Revise and audit rewrites a whole section and audits coherence across chapters. This guide covers both, and the guarantee that runs under each.

1. Suggestions: surgical edits, citations untouchable

The Suggestions tab reads a section and returns line-level edit cards for clarity, academic tone, concision, and precision. Each card shows the original text struck through, the proposed replacement, and a short rationale. You Apply the ones you want and Skip the rest; nothing is a wholesale rewrite.

Every suggestion targets a verbatim span of plain prose, so a citation pill and the claim it supports can never be dropped or invented by an edit. They are locked by construction. If you do accept an edit that changes a cited sentence, run "Verify all" back in the Thesis Editor to re-check it (the Suggestions path is deliberately narrow and does not re-verify on its own).

2. Revise and audit: rewrite a whole section, safely

When a section needs more than line edits, Revise rewrites the whole thing in your chosen prose style and streams the result as a preview. The important part is what happens next: any cited claim whose wording the rewrite changed is re-checked by the Fact Checker against its source, and its real verdict settles in place below the preview. A claim that read supported at the old wording and drifted during the rewrite comes back partial or unsupported, before anything is written to your document.

Applying the revision is atomic: the prose is committed, the claims are re-bound, and they are re-verified in one transaction. Your text and your verification ledger cannot drift apart, because they are updated together or not at all. If the stream fails mid-rewrite, a blocking fallback still returns a verified revision, so you never end up with an applied-but-unchecked section.

3. Prose style is not citation style

Revise works in a prose style (APA, MLA, Chicago, or IEEE) that governs copy-editing conventions like register and phrasing. That is distinct from your project's citation style, which governs how references are formatted. The prose style is seeded from your project's citation style so a Chicago project is not silently copy-edited to APA rules, and an explicit override you set persists across reloads. Whichever you pick, citations are protected throughout.

4. Cross-chapter coherence, not just sentences

Chapters written weeks apart drift. Run Revise at chapter or thesis scope and it also audits coherence, surfacing four kinds of problem: terminology drift (the same idea named two ways), broken cross-references (a "see Chapter 3" that no longer points anywhere), contradictions between sections, and gaps in the narrative arc.

Each finding is anchored to the section it spans with a jump link straight into the editor, and you Resolve or Reopen it as you work through the list. The findings are persisted, so they survive a reload and a bulk "Mark all resolved" runs safely in sequence; the open count is always the honest remaining total.

A safe revision workflow

• Use Suggestions for line-level polish; Apply the edits you want, one at a time.
• Use Revise at section scope for a full rewrite; read the re-verified verdicts before you Apply.
• After any accepted edit to a cited sentence, re-run verification so no claim keeps a stale verdict.
• Run Revise at chapter or thesis scope near the end to catch terminology drift, broken cross-references, and contradictions.
• Resolve each coherence finding from its jump link; drive the open count to zero before you compile.