writing-claim-needs-groundlisted

# Every claim travels with its ground A conclusion does not go to a person without the fact it rests on. If the fact does not fit, shorten the conclusion, not the fact. What the run could not check, it does not claim. A guess said aloud ("the 11th, right?") is not allowed. ## Why A conclusion without its ground reads as a fact. People act on it, and later there is nothing to defend the decision with. We sent our owner a clean explanation: two messages sent from one of our profiles explained why it got 3 accepts out of 37 invites, and a follow-up email was ready. Next day we checked the dates. The two messages went out after all 37 invites had been sent, so they could not have caused anything. The real cause was already in the log of the same run: 408 old invites still pending on that profile from before we started using it. And the email did not exist: the same log said the run could not open the mailbox. Every piece of the message sounded right. None of it held. The same failure shows up with decisions. Our notes once recorded "the owner decided to switch profiles". There had been no such conversation. It was our own suggestion, written down as the owner's decision a day later. A made-up decision is worse than a missing one: it closes a question that was never answered and sends the work in the wrong direction. With prospects the cost is higher. A fact about them without a source ("saw you're hiring", "saw your post on the 11th") that turns out wrong spends the only fi