Ghost Words

They read fine. That is the problem.

The vendor claim that nobody ever actually promised. The citation that leads nowhere. The specific-sounding number that entered the document three drafts ago and cannot be traced to anything. Ghost words - text that carries the shape of verified fact without the substance - have always existed in working documents. AI drafting multiplied them, because the machine produces confident, well-formed, plausible text at a speed no checking habit was built for.

This book installs the checking habit: ten minutes a day, with a timer, before your work goes out.

The habit works because of what the timer does. After hours inside a document you are in hunting mode - finishing, polishing, defending. The ten-minute timer switches you to judging mode: you step back and read your own work the way the person who has to approve it will. The gap you could not see becomes obvious. Then the timer rings, and the fixing - which is a different job - begins.

Inside:

- The daily habit itself: what to read, what to ask, when to stop
- The vendor-claims inventory: sorting what you have been told into hard promises, soft promises, and assumed facts - before the contract, not after
- Four passes for any significant draft: structure, evidence, voice, and gates - each pass one question, each question answerable in minutes
- The escalation rule: which documents get the full treatment and which get the short version
>For professionals who move documents, vendors and decisions all day, and whose name is on what goes out.

Ten minutes is short enough to survive contact with a real calendar - which is the point. A verification habit you skip protects nothing. This one you will keep, because it fits before the send button, and because the first ghost word it catches in your own work will make the case better than this description can.