The Discipline of the Devil's Advocate Pass
Launch library · evergreen read
A devil's advocate pass means deliberately reading a draft as though trying to disprove it, actively searching for the weakest claim, the thinnest source, the assumption most likely to collapse under scrutiny, rather than reading with the comfortable expectation that the piece already holds together well.
This exercise works best when done separately from the ordinary editing pass focused on clarity and style, since combining the two tasks tends to let the harder, more adversarial questions quietly slide by in favour of smoother, more comfortable prose fixes that feel productive without actually testing anything. Scheduling the two passes on separate days, rather than back to back, helps a writer approach the second pass with genuinely fresh scepticism rather than lingering satisfaction from the first.
Doing this pass alone has real value, but doing it with a colleague genuinely willing to argue against the piece, rather than simply confirming it, tends to surface weaknesses that a writer too close to their own work will often, quite understandably, tend to miss entirely on their own.