A nice reminder of the importance of some of the fundamentals of the work. I'd been struggling with a little with some chunks of writing, for various reasons that I won't go into. But, I managed to turn out something, and each section definitely needed work, but the nature of the thing was such that my usual, higher-level lens and filters weren't really applicable. I didn't have a clear pathway to making it better.
Two things that I'm not entirely rigid about these days but which always help -- reading the text aloud, and Procrustean cutting.
I think about rhythm a lot when reading and writing, so reading things aloud really helps me zero in on what's working and what's not. I get about 90% of this just from reading things properly in my head, but there's nothing like a forcing function to really make sure.
Cutting text down, especially in games, is also so important and powerful. Working on The Last Clockwinder, I had to cut the script in half, then in half again. It's amazing how sharp you can make things when you break through the boundaries of what's really necessary. I'm naturally quite concise and sharp, I think, but there's a huge difference between one's baseline writing and what happens when you make yourself cut away more than you thiunk you can.
I use a heuristic of 20%. Cut 20% of the words of a given section. I rarely do this exercise explicitly, any more, but it never fails to improve a piece of text. I try not to weasel out of it, unless I'm certain I can't take anything more away without breaking something fundamentally important about it.