writinglisted

# Writing Two failures, opposite directions, and this project has committed both. **Obscure.** Internal terms used with no explanation, compressed until the author cannot read it back. An independent reviewer of one of our design documents reported it could not follow the document — the terms were ours and nowhere defined. **Padded.** Length standing in for substance: preamble before the point, a summary of what was just said, hedges around a claim that is either true or not. Fixing one by committing the other is the usual mistake. Both rules apply at once. ## The rules Fourteen. Read this list; reach for a reference file only where noted. **Say the thing** 1. **Lead with the conclusion.** First sentence carries it. No warm-up, no restating the question. 2. **Cut the summary paragraph.** If the reader needed it, the body was too long. Fix the body. 3. **One claim per sentence.** Two claims joined by "and" hide which one is load-bearing. 4. **Delete every sentence that survives its own removal.** Read the paragraph without it: if nothing is lost, it was padding. 5. **No hedging.** "It may be worth considering" → say it, or drop it. Uncertainty gets stated as uncertainty ("unverified", "I have not measured this"), never smeared over the whole sentence. **Explain your own terms** 6. **A project term gets one clause on first use in every document.** Not a glossary link — the reader is reading *here*. `references/glossary.md` is the source; the clause is inline.