Editorial Quality at Scale: A Reproducible Prose-Review Pipeline

This paper documents template_prose_project, the prose-focused exemplar of the Research Project Template (https://github.com/docxology/template). It pairs the template's two-layer architecture with the prose analysis infrastructure (https://github.com/docxology/template/tree/main/infrastructure/prose) (readability metrics, structural outline, editorial quality flags) and the reference validation infrastructure (https://github.com/docxology/template/tree/main/infrastructure/reference) (BibTeX validation), demonstrating that rigorous editorial review can be expressed as a configurable, deterministic pipeline with no novel domain algorithm of its own. A single manuscript/config.yaml defines target grade-level bands, citation-density floors, structural rules (every section has an H1, no heading levels skipped), and bibliography-consistency policy. The pipeline reads the manuscript, runs the prose analysers, cross-checks every citation against manuscript/references.bib, evaluates the configured checks, and writes a deterministic markdown review report alongside three figures (per-file word counts, readability metrics, citation density) and a JSON manuscript_report.json suitable for CI artefacts. Run snapshot. The current configuration analyses 8 file(s) totalling 1742 words across 86 sentence(s) and 64 paragraph(s). Average Flesch-Kincaid grade level is 15.93; average Gunning Fog index is 16.69; the manuscript references 6 unique citation key(s); the longest section is 413 words and the shortest is 17. These numbers are auto-substituted by scripts/z_generate_manuscript_variables.py after every run, so the abstract tracks the JSON outputs in output/. The contribution is methodological and architectural: a generic, reusable prose-quality module (infrastructure/prose/) that any project in the template can opt into, plus a minimal, configurable exemplar (projects/templates/template_prose_project/) that wires it to the bibliography and the manuscript pipeline. Keywords: prose analysis, readability, editorial review, reproducible manuscript review, scientific infrastructure --- Associated artifacts GitHub release: v0.4.2 (https://github.com/docxology/template_prose_project/releases/tag/v0.4.2) DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20417104 Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/20417104 PDF SHA-256: 290d21b10bd588b978d6a3200cdf0e3c2441ca86fcdc777ab41975fa910a260e