Writing style guide

This page is a working protocol for prose on this site. It guides three readers: future me, a human editor, and a machine model: artificial intelligence generative language model. Review a draft with empathy, and edit it for consistency and clarity.

A written protocol holds one voice steady across years, moods, and tools. Read each item as a pressure test from a cross-check list. Apply it, and see what the sentence gains in its context. Every rule here is local, situated, and open to revision.

Purpose§

Readers§

Write for a shadow reader: a reader who is often excluded, tired, distracted, multilingual, and/or neurodivergent. Future me reads first.

A sentence that holds for a tired reader holds for most readers. Precision still needs its own check. The register sits between academic and plain, so a practitioner keeps reading and a newcomer follows without a glossary.

• Cut obscure jargon. Keep poetic precision.
• Define a needed term once, then use it as defined.
• Replace a term that needs repeated definition.

Voice§

My English sits across several boxes, and the edit keeps its marks.

It carries four influences: the Bangladeshi English and Bangla idioms of a Dhaka upbringing, the grammar of independent cinema, the hand-coded early web, and years of bureaucratic and academic English. Standard fluency sands those marks away.

• Keep Bangla code-switching. Dialect is deliberate.
• Spell Bangla in Latin letters as it sounds in Bangla, not by the Anglo standard: অ as o (kokhono, not kakhono), শ and ষ as sh (shomoy, sholo), and kori, not kodi, kaudi or cowrie. Names keep the spelling their owners use (Kabir Suman, Zahir Raihan). The colonial spellings stay only inside quotations and published titles.
• Read fragments and slashes as thought in motion. Answer the idea first, and copyedit on request.
• Keep the voice in the writer’s hand. A polished rewrite replaces it.

Priority§

When two rules pull apart, the higher one wins.

House preferences serve the reader. A preference that bends the meaning has stopped serving.

• Order: accuracy, then intended meaning, then reader comprehension, then house preference.
• Quotations, citations, titles, and code keep their own form, whatever this page says.
• When a rule damages the sentence, break the rule and note why in the version history.

Writing§

Sentences§

Give each clause one job, and state what holds or changes.

Competing clauses split attention. A sentence that names the surviving condition (“The institution held”) carries more than one built around an absence (“The institution did not change”).

• Prefer physical verbs: “arrive” over “manifest,” “shape” over “determine.” Keep a series at one altitude and one form: “curates, filters, and gatekeeps.”
• Name the noun again when a pronoun could point two ways.
• Keep a negative when the rejected claim is the argument: “Unlearning does not erase the old route.” Accuracy outranks assertiveness.

Words§

Choose the word that names what happened, at its true scale.

Filler signals a hedge (just, actually, basically), a package (moreover, “it is important to note,” key takeaways), or an inflation (literally, incredibly, delve). Crutch words repeat without a job: question, encounter, route, practice. Question words used as rhetoric are filler too: who, what, when, where, why and how, set up as a staged question (“Why does this matter?”) or a teaser (“Here is how”). Both delay the claim and sound wise without saying more. State the claim. Keep these words for a plain grammatical job: the reader who returns. Each costs the tired reader attention, and so do -ize, -ness, and -ly words that bury a plain verb.

Prefer one verb to a phrasal verb. In put off, take away, find out or go on, the meaning hides in a small particle that a reader of English as a second language must guess. Choose the single verb: postpone, remove, learn, continue. Keep a phrasal verb only when no single verb says the same thing as plainly.

• Labor: “repair” when the work carries effort and history. “Fix” suits a typo.
• Scale: “weaken” when the change is partial. “Dismantle” claims the structure fell.
• Bodies: a body may “challenge” or “exceed” a norm. “Violate” puts the fault in the body, and the body is innocent.

Marks§

Let punctuation pace the reading, and keep its set small.

Each mark asks the reader to change pace. Few marks, used the same way every time, become habit. Quotations, citations, and code keep their original marks.

• Pauses: a comma, a full stop, or a new sentence does most of the work. A full stop replaces the semicolon. The em dash appears rarely, where the interruption is the rhythm. A colon introduces a list, a definition, or an elaboration, usually once per paragraph. Context moves out of parentheses and into the sentence when it can.
• Lists: no comma before the last and or or: essays, notes and poems. Keep it only where the list would misread without it: tea, bread and butter, and jam.
• Separators and ranges: a spaced slash separates (Log / Notes). An en dash joins a range (2001–2026). In prose, choose one word over a slashed pair.
• Dates, breaks, and headings: ISO dates in metadata (2026-10-04), spoken dates in prose (29 March 2019). Section break *** in both scripts. Headings and labels in sentence case.

Editing§

Structure§

Give every text a shape the reader can hold: a few parts, short paragraphs, concrete things first.

Three is a drafting habit. It keeps a section compact and invites a test of anything extra. A necessary fourth point stays.

• A section opens with its instruction, then why it matters, then how to apply it or three examples.
• Objects before categories: “A drop-down menu, a clinical report, a prompt box. Each is an interface.” A coined term gets its own definition sentence. Stacked abstract nouns unfold into one verb and one object: “A default curates attribution.”
• Endnotes carry the second voice: doubt, position, autobiographical texture, scholarly support. The body carries the argument. Link text names its destination and still reads well on paper.

Strike and repair§

Strike a default word that someone else supplied, and write the repair beside it: ~~default~~ repair.

Interfaces, forms, platforms, and generative models hand over vocabulary already chosen. The struck word is the expected one, so the reader recognizes it at a glance and the repair does the thinking. Some repairs correct a term. Others make an argument, and an argument is open to dispute.

• Correction: artificial intelligence generative language model. The vendor’s term gives way to a description of the mechanism.
• Argument: social media attention and data extraction platforms. The repair names a business model, a claim the essay then supports.
• Argument: feel-good genre dopamine-trap genre, and detective story a police narrative in disguise. Each names the default of a market or an industry, and makes a reading of it.

Use one strike per paragraph at most, and name the source of the default once.

Review§

Separate three acts: diagnosis, suggestion, and edit. The writer authorizes the third.

An editor, human or machine, sees patterns the writer has stopped seeing. The writer knows what the sentence is for. Each keeps their part.

• Diagnose plainly. A broken sentence is broken, and a contradiction is a contradiction. Respect allows disagreement. Add only the evidence the writer supplies, and keep sourced findings apart from interpretation.
• Suggest beside the text, and edit only on request. Read the before-and-after diff in version control, and ask what each change removed.
• Mark the seam. A seam is any passage where a generative language model supplied wording, a translation, or a paragraph that stays in the text. Spelling and punctuation fixes fall below that line. Name the involvement in the version history, and in an endnote when one passage carries it.

Version history§

1.9 (2026-11-14). Prefer one verb to a phrasal verb: remove, not take away; postpone, not put off. Plain-language guidance for readers of English as a second language.

1.8 (2026-11-10). Bangla in Latin letters follows its Bangla sound, not the Anglo standard: kokhono, shomoy, kori. Names keep their owners’ spelling.

1.7 (2026-11-08). No question words as rhetoric: state the claim. Section headings renamed Purpose, Writing and Editing, since the guide now avoids its own staged questions.

1.6 (2026-11-04). No serial comma, unless a list would misread without it.

1.5 (2026-10-04). Headings ask who, why, and how. Rule priority added. Seam and review authority defined. Verb table folded into Words. Exceptions for quotations, citations, code, and ranges. File and metadata rules moved to the site’s decision log.

1.4 (2026-10-04). Rule of three throughout: instruction, why, how. Strike and repair shown in use. Editing instructions folded into the page. Semicolons and negative framing removed.

1.3 (2026-10-04). Copyedited and compressed. US spelling. Screen rules moved to the site’s decision log.

1.2 (2026-10-04). Sentence-case headings. Added strike and repair, links, labels, marks and dates, Bangla, and citation.

1.1 (2026-08-25). Added assertive framing, suffix and crutch-word checks, show before tell, and two verbs (outlive, hold).

1.0 (2026-08-25). First draft, from a working session on the unlearning framework.