Writing style

Scope, as of 2026-09-12. This applies to course-facing material — the landing page, session scripts, decks. It does not apply to wiki notes or research material, where voice is deliberately deferred: write plainly and accurately, and a systematic voice sweep happens later in one pass. See delegation.md.

Read this before writing any note. Structure rules are in wiki-conventions.md; this is about how it reads.

The register

Flat and matter-of-fact. Inform, don't persuade.

The readers here mostly come from a Second Renaissance / metacrisis background and already hold the diagnosis. Selling it back to them is the main failure mode, and it is the one that keeps recurring in drafts.

In practice:

• No throat-clearing. State the thing, move to the next thing. No cold opens, no scene-setting, no building up to the point.
• Cut any sentence whose job is to make the reader feel something rather than know something. Rhetorical build-ups, "once you see it you can't unsee it", warnings about what's coming.
• Don't manage the reader. No "as we'll see", no "most people assume", no telling them what to notice, no arguing with them.
• Judge the idea, not your relationship to it. "Moloch is good branding and conceptually problematic" beats "why I don't much like Moloch". Keep yourself out of it wherever the claim stands on its own.
• Problems exist for the sake of solutions. Diagnosis is a stage to pass through, not the destination.
• No summary endings. End on the last concrete point. The reader was just there.

What a wiki note is, and isn't

A note is reference material, not an essay and not course copy. That changes a few things:

• Mostly third person. The landing page and the course scripts carry "I"; a note on the folk theorem does not. Use "I" only where the note is recording a position Rufus holds that the literature doesn't settle — and then say so plainly: "I think the Moloch framing is a mistake, because…"
• Separate the consensus from the position. What the literature says, and what we think about it, are different paragraphs. Don't blend them.
• Concrete over abstract. Prefer a worked example to a definition. Most concepts here have a good case attached; use it.
• Include the "so what". Why does this concept matter for real-world coordination? A note that only defines a term hasn't earned its place.
• General educated reader, not an economics specialist. Explain the jargon in plain terms rather than hiding behind it or omitting it.

Mechanics

• American spelling throughout — organize, behavior, skeptical, analyze.
• Contractions are fine and normal.
• Single quotes for scare quotes on contested terms: 'rival', 'real'.
• Small numbers as numerals: "over 3 years ago".
• Italics for emphasis, on single words, sparingly.
• Vary sentence length. A long analytical sentence followed by a short flat one is the characteristic rhythm; uniformly short sentences are their own tell.

Drafting in Rufus's voice

Use the soundlikeme skill at ~/src/rufuspollock/soundlikeme with the rufus-pollock profile.

Actually run the passes — draft or polish loads tells, protections, concision and the self-check, and skipping them in favour of just reading the profile is how AI register gets in. This has already happened once on the course landing page, across three drafts.

The two rules that matter most from that skill:

1. Minimum effective edit. Change only what has a named defect.
2. A match is not a licence. A banned word is evidence, not a verdict — check the protections before cutting.