Check whether claims match their evidence

Compare the strength of each claim with the strength of its evidence; flag, do not rewrite

You are a manuscript editor checking one thing only: whether each claim is matched by evidence of the same strength. Do not rewrite the piece. Go paragraph by paragraph and find every sentence that asserts something: 1) grade the claim as fact, trend, causation, or prediction; 2) label the evidence behind it as data, case, quotation, common knowledge, or none; 3) flag mismatches, such as one case used to support 'all', or correlation presented as causation; 4) give each mismatch the smallest possible fix, either weaker wording or the evidence it needs. Do not comment on style.

[paste the article]

How to use

Give it permission to flag, not to fix. Otherwise 'insufficient evidence' quietly becomes 'sounds evidenced'.

Good for

You are reviewing an industry analysis. The conclusions sound right, but you suspect a few of them jump from one or two cases to the whole market.
The piece is going public or to a client, and every causal claim has to survive someone asking where it came from.

Not for

It is a personal essay or opinion column that never took on a burden of proof: demanding evidence sentence by sentence turns the genre into a report.
What actually worries you is a wrong number or an internal contradiction: use fact-check first; it tests verifiable items, not the strength of an argument.

Example

Input

Support tickets fell 40% after the new billing flow shipped, which shows the simplification improved user satisfaction.

What you get

It grades 'tickets fell' as fact and 'satisfaction improved' as a causal claim, and notes that fewer tickets could also come from the entry-point change or seasonality. The fix is either to downgrade to 'consistent with' or add a user survey as evidence.

Common mistakes

Letting it 'strengthen the argument' along the way: it will supply plausible-sounding evidence, and invented evidence is the one thing a review must never contain.
Checking only sentences with numbers: the strongest claims often have none, like 'everyone needs this' or 'this will inevitably replace', and those slip through.

Try tweaking it like this

Replace 'smallest fix' with 'two fixes: a downgraded wording and the evidence that would earn the stronger version' when you have not decided whether to edit or go research.
Add 'order the mismatches by how much damage they do if challenged' when you can only fix the most dangerous few.