Voice
Tone: Declarative, Specific, Plain.
Rules
State the decision, then the reason. In that order.
Decision first because the reader may already agree and can move on. Reason second because they may not. The pattern, from Site.astro: 'The library is the front door, so the wordmark is the only way back — a nav item pointing at the page you are on is furniture for its own sake.'
Derived from. The house pattern
Present tense, active, no throat-clearing.
Yes: 'The player lives in the layout, not on the reading page.' No: 'We've decided that it would probably make sense for the player to be located in the layout.' Never describe your own work as elegant. Make it elegant and say what it does.
Derived from. The register
Name the thing you rejected.
This is the single most characteristic move in the voice. It makes a decision unrepeatable, so nobody re-litigates it six months later, and it teaches. The strongest sentences in the codebase are the ones that close a door: 'A player that stops when you open another page is not a player, it is a preview.'
Derived from. The characteristic move
Cite when there is something to cite.
If a constraint comes from somewhere, a typographic authority, a spec, a book, say where. tokens.css gives page numbers; THESIS.md gives years and titles. Unattributed confidence is the register we are trying not to be in.
Derived from. The thesis
Contractions are fine. Exclamation points are not.
The voice is plain, not stiff. But nothing here is exciting enough to need a bang, and emoji do not appear in product copy, headings, or source comments.
Derived from. The register
Admit the provisional, plainly, once.
Say it in one clause and keep going. Do not apologise, do not hedge every subsequent sentence, and do not turn the admission into a personality. 'We start with a curated collection. Whether this becomes a product is not settled.' That is the whole move. Holding a sincere claim and a knowing shrug at the same time is the thesis; performing the shrug for three paragraphs is not.
Derived from. The thesis
The machine says so.
Any text generated or proposed by a model is labelled as such, in words, at the point of use, not in a footer disclaimer. The label is plain: 'Proposed,' 'Machine-found,' 'Unreviewed.' Never 'AI-powered.' A colour alone is not a disclosure either: the machine blue is paired with the word.
Derived from. THESIS §V
Sentence case everywhere except ml-label, which is uppercase because it is the machine's voice and is letterspaced accordingly.
This is the copy half of the letterspacing law: capitals are always letterspaced, lowercase never is. It does not mean a label must BE capitals; on a list surface, labels are sentence case and quiet.
Derived from. The capitalization law
Essay prose writes in the Jungian essayists' register; microcopy stays plain.
Hillman and Moore are the models for the publication's writing: psyche taken as real, argument through image, etymology and myth as evidence. The failure mode is pastiche; soul-language sprinkled on interface copy is worse than either register alone, so buttons, empty states, and errors keep the plain front-matter voice.
Derived from. Abe, 2026-08-29
No aphorism turns or clever inversions. Say the plain version.
'One question asked in four vocabularies' and every not-X-but-Y cousin read as performed erudition. If the sentence pivots on its own cleverness, rewrite it to state the claim directly.
Derived from. Abe, 2026-08-29
No em dashes in user-facing copy. Recast the sentence instead.
Use a colon, a comma, or two sentences. The dash had leaked into the site prose from drafts written outside the loop.
Derived from. House non-negotiable
Do and don't
Do
The player lives in the layout, not on the reading page.
Don't
We've decided that it would probably make sense for the player to be located in the layout.
Do
A player that stops when you open another page is not a player, it is a preview.
Don't
We built a persistent player for a seamless listening experience.
Do
A real input[type=range] rather than a div: keyboard, screen readers and touch all work without reimplementing any of it.
Don't
We leveraged a custom slider component to deliver a powerful, elegant interaction.
Do
We start with a curated collection. Whether this becomes a product is not settled.
Don't
We're still figuring things out, and it's worth noting that this may or may not become a product, but we think there's something here.
Do
Proposed connection — unreviewed
Don't
AI-powered smart recommendations
By surface
Do not editorialise about how the library grows. A reader looking at an empty shelf does not need a manifesto.
Do
Don't
Prefer
Avoid
