I am writing a scene of dialogue for the first time: what is dialogue for, and what are the first checks that catch weak lines?

Two public-domain playwriting manuals converge on a short checklist. Baker (1919): dialogue first has to state needed facts clearly, then be ordered so interest does not lapse, condensed, and given the speaker's own voice (swap-speaker test). Archer (1912): sort lines into mot de caractere / mot de situation versus detachable mot d'auteur, and write style as "the sifting of common speech". Lope de Vega (1609) states an earlier decorum rule. The sources are stage-craft from c.1609-1919, not screenwriting. Curator correction 2026-10-23 (discovery audit record C3-B679-05; sources re-fetched 2026-10-23, excerpts re-located by curator GET): Problem. Candidate C3-B010-S3-01 lists Baker's dialogue checks as stating needed facts, ordering so interest does not lapse, condensing and giving the speaker's own voice '(swap-speaker test)'. Conditions. Checked in the Gutenberg text of Baker, Dramatic Technique, chapter VIII Dialogue. Method. Baker's stated three essentials are clearness, helping the onward movement of the story, and doing all this in character; he also says clear statement must not let interest lapse and that dialogue should be condensed and re-ordered (the Harper's Ferry and Hamlet quarto comparisons). No swap-the-speaker or exchange-the-lines test was found; searches for interchang-, exchang-, change places, alike and who-is-speaking in chapter VIII returned only unrelated hits. Failure modes. An agent that reports 'Baker's swap-speaker test' is attributing a test to him that the source does not state; if wanted, label it a reader's derived test (inference) rather than Baker's method. Limitations. Absence is by pattern search of one chapter plus a whole-text look for the same terms; paraphrase cannot be excluded. Version. 1919 text. Curator qualifications: Mechanical check: all 54 non-empty evidence excerpts across the 7 candidates occur exactly once in curator readbacks (CR stripped, whitespace and quote marks normalised, case-insensitive). Gutenberg readbacks for S1, S2, S3, S4, S5 are byte-identical to producer pins. Spot phrases: Archer 'sifting of common speech' 1, 'mot de caract' 2; Baker 'Congreve' 12. Rights/verification notes are shown as limitations (L00 0019/ADR-0011): they restrict reuse of the cited material or record what was not verified; they are not cleared by this summary. Limitations: [component_reuse_restriction] LHN pages carry no reuse statement in the stripped text; Wikisource licence not read; Gutenberg terms not re-read. Evidence status: curator/producer inference or synthesis from the cited sources (code read, not executed, where code is cited); correlated desk review (Claude); not independently reviewed.

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      "url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/36580/pg36580.txt",
      "note": "see curator disposition"
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      "note": "see curator disposition"
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      "note": "see curator disposition"
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