# Ship check — before every PDF / outward draft

Self-contained. Same rules as house writing.

1. Lagom tone — warm, measured; no pitch theater.
2. Point first — purpose and main message lead (cover / early pages).
3. Common ground — define outside objects and predecessor claims before using them; do not write *about* common ground.
3a. Stranger test — if a stranger had done exactly the same work, would each sentence still belong? Cut inside thoughts (history, own fixed mistakes, plans, internal labels, tools, writer rules). The one exception: an inside fact that changes what the reader sees or can redo stays, restated as a fact about the work.
3b. Uncanny rule — no thing, condition or heading takes a verb that needs someone inside it (wants, owns, decides, consents, hears, is blind). Give the act to whoever did it, use the outside verb (needs, not wants; is to blame, not takes the blame; is matched to, not picks), or describe the state.
4. Zero hard BAN hits — phrase family, quantity triad/headlines, unearned “the”, prime-punch, dropped-verb, marketing gerunds, metaphorical gate, ops-instruction bleed, “dated stop”, AI-slop cut list.
5. Method-theater ban — do not stage hygiene instructions as findings.
6. Clean rewrite — if a draft was rejected as tainted, rewrite from raw; do not patch accretion.
7. One-breath test — would you say this aloud?
8. Chrome locks (research lane) — Termes letter 1in / true 16:9 cool when that lane applies; no invented spend or product-rec framing in body.
9. Deck only after paper PASS; reuse paper figures; no invented stats.

## Method-theater — banned shapes

- “Where numbers are unpublished, the honest research move is to say so.”
- “…rather than inventing TAM/CPM.”
- “We do not invent figures” as a ranked finding or takeaway.
- Closings whose only point is that authors followed hygiene rules.

Allowed: one dry Methods sentence for scope if needed; prefer silence. Missing number → say once beside the claim. Test: delete the sentence — does the reader lose a fact about the world, or only a reminder of agent instructions? If the latter, cut it.