Writing that does not read as written by a machine.

Rules

• Date everything
• First person, and say what you did
• Record the wrong turn
• Hedge honestly
• Leave it rough

Never

• Retconning. Do not rewrite yesterday's note to match today's understanding; write a new one.
• A conclusion the evidence does not support yet.
• Deleting the thing that turned out wrong.

Rules

• Concrete over abstract
• Let the meaning choose the word
• Keep the hedge that carries a fact
• Do not chop at the conjunction
• No throat-clearing
• The short sentence is the verdict

Never

• Em dashes.
• "Not X, it is Y." Say Y.
• A summary of what the reader just read.
• Adjectives standing in as instructions.
• Explaining to readers what they obviously are, or why they are here.
• Restating a claim in different words to be sure it landed. See below: that is where condescension actually comes from.

How pastiche fails

• The variance collapse.
• One subject, one shape, three times.
• Mechanical de-Latinising
• Hedge-stripping

Detection standard deviation over mean, below 0.35. And three consecutive sentences opening with the same word, unless it is deliberate anaphora, which is distinguishable because deliberate anaphora runs three or more with escalation rather than two by accident.

Rules

• Variance carries the argument
• Keep the qualifier, and pick the right one
• Concede before the strongest claim, never after
• The thesis may move, and that movement is the essay
• Move downward, from the general to the particular
• Brevity is the diction of command

Never

• Never restate the argument at the end. The conclusion-that-recaps is a vestige of legal rhetoric, where it was the closing remarks to a jury, surviving in a form whose purpose is not persuasion.
• Never peter out. The failure Graham names is starting on the most radioactive question and then recoiling from it, ending on "one thing is certain: the question is a complex one."
• Never ask a rhetorical question you do not then answer with a fact.
• Never say "clearly" or "obviously". If it were, the sentence would be unnecessary.
• Never build a strawman. It costs more credibility than it wins.
• Never digress without paying for it. Digression is licensed, but under a constraint: the essay owes the reader something they did not already know.

How pastiche fails

• claim-altitude with no evidence under it
• The aphorism with no referent.
• The unearned "we".
• The colon that promises depth
• "Not X but Y", saturated.
• The escalating tricolon.
• The summary ending in disguise.

Detection count the sentences making a general claim with no number, name, date or object in them. In the measured essays that ratio is low and clusters at section ends. Uniform across the text, the piece is intoning rather than arguing. Then, for each general sentence, ask what specific observation produced it. If there is none, it is decoration.

Rules

• Count the words in the first sentence
• News first, source second, unless it is contentious
• Two adjectives, then rewrite
• Days of the week, never yesterday
• Give the actor
• Never adopt the subject's framing
• Numbers, and repeat the surprising ones

Never

• Never put opinion in a news story. Features get no exemption.
• Never leave a claim unattributed. Contentious statements are re-sourced every time they appear, and "alleged" is not a substitute for a source.
• Never use a judging adjective or adverb: a hard-line speech, a glowing tribute, a staunch conservative.
• Never use an unverifiable superlative: unique, unprecedented, first, only, largest, record. If somebody else claims it, attribute the claim to them.
• Never read minds. "To write that someone hinted, implied, indicated, suggested, or signaled is to interpret someone's thoughts. This is rarely acceptable."
• Never qualify a denial. No "flatly denied", no "categorically denied", unless it is inside a quote.
• Never use journalese: reportedly, probe, dubbed, slammed, massive, embattled, oil-rich, looks set to, hit by fears that.
• Never use euphemism. "Died of cancer", not "passed away after a fight with cancer".
• Never alter a quotation, even to fix grammar.
• Never boast about your own reporting.
• Never begin with a question. "The audience wants to be informed, not take part in a quiz."

How pastiche fails

• Journalese standing in for reporting.
• The sympathetic attribution verb.
• The unattributed background paragraph.
• The lede that summarises rather than reports.
• Adopting the subject's own name for the thing.
• The unverifiable superlative, unattributed.
• Mind reading.
• The pyramid shape with an argument inside it.

Detection count the adjectives and adverbs that could not be checked by a third party, then count the sentences with no attribution. In wire copy the first number is near zero and the second is near zero. Either one rising is the writer becoming visible.

Rules

• Facts, not sentences about facts
• Parallel structure, always
• No connective tissue
• Absent is a value
• Order by what is looked up

Never

• A sentence whose only job is transition.
• An adjective standing in for a measurement.
• Prose paragraphs. If it needs one, it belongs on a different page.
• Personality of any kind.

Rules

• Tell them what to do
• One instruction per step
• Say what happens next
• Name the failure and the fix together
• No voice

Never

• A preamble before the steps.
• "Simply", "just", "easy". If it were, they would not be reading this.
• A cross-reference where the answer would fit. Say it twice rather than send them away.
• Explaining why before saying what. The why goes after, for the reader who wants it.

Rules

• Long sentences, varied hard
• Three pronouns, three jobs
• The name arrives after the thing
• Name the confusion as a fact, not a question
• Predict the wrong inference, then cancel it
• Every analogy carries its own expiry
• Reassurance must be attached to a fact
• Say where every claim stands
• Retract the scope at the end

Never

• "Just". A filler that presumes a background. Usually deletable with no loss of meaning.
• "Simply", "easy", "trivially", "of course", "everyone knows", "as you'd expect". All share one mechanic: they assert the reader's mental state, so a reader who is stuck is told in passing that being stuck is anomalous.
• "Obviously" and "clearly" aimed at the reader. One licensed exception, from Halmos: you may call something obvious to place it in perspective, and if you do, make sure the obvious thing is true. Nielsen's only real use of it is aimed at his own model. Point it at your own claim, never at the reader's comprehension.
• Tag questions. "Makes sense?", "See?", "Pretty simple, right?" Each demands assent and offers no way to withhold it.
• A rhetorical question you answer yourself in the next clause. It stages a dialogue the reader is not in.
• Bluffing. Halmos: readers sense concealment, and they blame neither the facts nor themselves. They blame the author, correctly.
• An unbounded analogy, or one quietly doing a second job it was not introduced for.
• Simplifying the vocabulary below the reader's level. It buys nothing, measurably.

How pastiche fails

• no more accurate
• The collective pronoun misused.
• Reassurance with no content.
• Uniform short sentences.
• Enthusiasm standing in for structure.
• The analogy that is never taken away.
• Warm tone, expert sequencing.

Rules

• Proof arrives before the claim
• Select the reader, do not attract them
• Find out what the reader already knows before deciding what to say
• Every joint gets a short sentence
• Volunteer the flaw, and only if it is real
• The ask is an instruction plus the apparatus
• Plain language, and this one has a number on it

Never

• Never fabricate a testimonial, review, customer or screenshot of one. This stopped being a taste question on 21 October 2024. 16 CFR Part 465 makes it a deceptive practice to write, sell or disseminate a testimonial misrepresenting that the reviewer exists, that they used the product, or what happened. §465.4 also bans paying for a review conditioned on its sentiment. Civil penalties attach.
• Never manufacture urgency or scarcity. No resetting countdown, no invented stock level, no closing-tonight that reopens tomorrow. The FTC names False Low Stock, False Activity, False High Demand and Baseless Countdown Timer as distinct dark patterns. And it does not work: tested in isolation, scarcity cues and countdown timers produced no significant lift, 14.3 percent against 11.3 percent control, while aggressive dark patterns produced 65 dropouts against 9 and measurably more frustration (Luguri and Strahilevitz, 2021, n=3,777). Sites without scarcity cues rate more trustworthy. Note that this one is in the canon and not only in the imitators: Caples closes with "before it's too late to gain the special benefits of this offer" and no deadline is ever stated. There is nothing to be too late for. That is the most-copied line shape in the register and it is a lie by implication.
• Never use the preemptive claim. Hopkins' Schlitz method describes an industry-standard process as though it were exclusive, and he admits it: "All claims were such as any brewer might have made." It is a lie by implication even when every sentence is true, and it does not survive a reader who can search.
• Never simulate intimacy. Merged first names in a headline, fake handwriting, the spontaneous postscript, the I-am-writing-this-at-2am aside. Halbert's best attention device was printing the recipient's name in the headline of a mailed letter, which is manufactured intimacy at industrial scale. The machinery is visible to everyone now.
• Never use an unfalsifiable superlative. Hopkins: they cause readers "to discount the statements you make from that point on."
• Never entertain. Hopkins twice: "No one reads ads for amusement", and "Ads are not written to entertain." Fine writing "reveals the hook".
• Never let the selling show. "Any studied attempt to sell, if apparent, creates corresponding resistance."
• Never shout. Hopkins objects to oversized type on the grounds that nobody admires a salesman who talks in a loud voice.
• Never pad to length. "Long copy outsells short copy" is folklore with no dataset under it. The classics earned their length by having that much information.
• Never give a number without saying what it is a number of.

How pastiche fails

• Specificity inverts into invented precision.
• The proof order reverses
• The shape itself is now a signal.
• The personality is templated.

Rules

• Lead with what it does, not what it is
• Name the reader's problem in their words
• Proof immediately after the claim
• Proof a stranger can evaluate
• Handle the obvious objection before they leave
• One action

Never

• Superlatives without a measurement behind them. Best, leading, revolutionary, seamless.
• A feature list where a claim belongs.
• Words that mean nothing when negated. Nobody ships an unscalable, insecure product, so neither word is doing any work.
• Fake urgency. A deadline that is not real teaches the reader to distrust the real ones.
• A testimonial doing the job of a fact.

Rules

• The constructions everybody imitates are the ones he does not use
• The inversion he does use is not archaic at all
• Sentence-initial "For" is the genuine signature
• Prefer the Germanic word. Do not ban the Latinate one.
• The lexical stratum says which culture is speaking
• Register tracks the thread, not the page number
• One consciousness per chapter, and the order is a separate pass
• Lewis's five rules, which are the closest thing the genre has to a house style guide

Never

• Never "Then said he." Once in 477,518 words.
• Never thou as decoration. Eighty tokens in the whole novel.
• Never ichor. Once in 172,566 words of Eddison; zero across Dunsany, Morris and Malory. Zero in roughly 640,000 words of the four masters combined.
• Never tush, pish, zounds, marry. Zero in LOTR. Tolkien named these four as the definition of the vice and then never used one.
• Never eldritch, tenebrous, smaragd, chalcedony. Five occurrences across 640,000 words, all in Eddison.
• Never long sentences as a proxy for grandeur. Median 14 words; 36.5 percent at ten or fewer.
• Never a Latinate abstract noun where the register is heroic. The condemned passages score 47 Latinate suffixes per 1,000; the praised ones score 0.
• Never head-hop.
• Never an adjective that tells the reader how to feel.
• Never vague scenery. Le Guin's specific charge against the flat style: "the rocks, the wind, the trees are not there, are not felt; the scenery is cardboard, or plastic."

How pastiche fails

• And here is the mechanism in a single number.
• The "ye olde" problem.
• The thesaurus problem.
• The map-and-appendix problem.
• The tonal-coherence problem.

Rules

• The strange-word density is a constant. The invented share is not.
• A new word gets no gloss, or six words of one
• Read the standard deviation, not the mean
• The brand noun does the adjective's work
• Distance is countable

Never

• Never have two characters tell each other what they both already know.
• Never stop the story to lecture. The lexicon names the voice that does it a Stapeldon, and its worst form Dennis Hopper Syndrome, where "a loony character-actor barges into the story and baldly tells the protagonist what's going on by explaining the underlying mystery in a long bug-eyed rant."
• Never front-load. And never leave it empty either: the opposite failure has its own name, the Nowhere Nowhen Story.
• Never rename a familiar thing to make it exotic. Call a Rabbit a Smeerp: "common elements of the real world are re-named for a fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior."
• Never borrow a setting whole. Used Furniture: "We'll set it in the Star Trek Universe, only we'll call it the Empire instead of the Federation."
• Never let a brand name replace looking at something. Brand Name Fever: "You can stock a future with Hondas and Sonys and IBM's and still have no idea what it looks like."
• Never open in a white room. A character who wakes with no surroundings is an author who has not built any.
• Never pre-empt the reader's disbelief. You Can't Fire Me, I Quit: "It's a one-in-a-million chance, but it's so crazy it just might work!"
• Never write the guided tour. The Steam-Grommet Factory is a story that is "entirely a guided tour of a large and elaborate gimmick."

How pastiche fails

• More strange words.
• "Everything is chrome."
• chrome 14, black 140, neon 31, mirror 29.
• Even sentences mistaken for cool distance.
• The eyeball kick without the telling detail.
• Written from screen memory rather than page memory.

Detection take the first 1,200 words and count the capitalised terms, then count how many exist outside the text. The density should be 35 to 50 and the majority should be real. Then find the first appearance of the central invented noun and count the words of gloss attached to it. Six is generous. Zero is the register.

Rules

• Five words
• The log carries the exposition, and nothing else does
• Competence is the register
• One person from another culture, never the culture

Never

• Never explain the machine. "We don't need essays, however brilliant."
• Never let a regular be stupid, cowardly or petty.
• Never break the technology to manufacture jeopardy.
• Never make technology the villain.
• Never write a story about a whole civilisation.
• Never write fantasy in the costume of science fiction. "The difference between the two is profound."
• Never do psi-forces. "No matter how fantastic the events in a story, the explanation must be extrapolated from a generally accepted science theory."
• Never write melodrama, which "is a writing style which does not require believable people."
• Never open a log without a stardate.
• Never let a scene ramble. Forty-three minutes, five parts, and a median line of five words.
• Never let a scene fail the transposition test.

How pastiche fails

• Technobabble built wrong, not merely invented.
• the imitation is imitating other imitations
• The tech line as the resolution.
• The exposition character.
• Prose length instead of command length.
• Optimism performed instead of demonstrated.

Detection count the median dialogue sentence, and count how many times a technical noun ends a scene. Five and zero is the register. Anything longer, or a tech line doing the work of a decision, is somebody remembering the show rather than reading it.

Rules

• Uniform prose is the camouflage
• Hide it in a list, and never last
• Hand the attention off immediately
• Plant once, then go silent
• Let the reader supply the false inference
• The narrator may be wrong out loud, and may hide nothing
• Build the reveal as a monologue with interruptions
• No new evidence in the reveal

Never

• Never conceal a clue the detective has and the narrator saw. The Detection Club oath settles the whole argument in one line: "Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader?"
• Never solve it by coincidence, accident, unmotivated confession or intuition. The oath bans "Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God."
• Never introduce new physical evidence in the reveal.
• Never invent a poison, an element or an instrument. Van Dine: limit yourself "toxicologically speaking, to the pharmacopoeia."
• Never pin it on a stranger or a walk-on.
• Never let the supernatural resolve anything.
• Never let the detective not detect. "A detective is not a detective unless he detects."
• Never let the clue sentence have a different texture from its neighbours.
• Never underline. "Something about it struck me as odd" converts a clue into an announcement.
• Never repeat the clue before the reveal.
• Never let the Watson conceal a thought. He may misvalue anything and must hide nothing.
• Never write the reveal as one unbroken speech.
• Never mistake plainness for adverb deletion.

How pastiche fails

• The over-clued mystery.
• The withheld clue.
• The quirky detective instead of the intelligent one.
• Period voice performed at the wrong length.
• The stale device.
• The Watson written as an idiot.
• Implausibility the prose cannot carry.
• And the failure underneath all of them:

Detection for each clue, measure the distance between plant and payoff, and check what sits in the sentence immediately after the plant. In Styles those are half a book and a stronger stimulus. If the gap is short, or the next sentence is quiet, the clue has been announced.

Rules

• Never say "I"
• Present tense, and short
• Locate, then reveal
• Lengths cluster, they do not alternate
• Add, never caption
• Hedge the animal, not yourself

Never

• Never "I" in the absent-witness register. Zero, in 13,500 words.
• Never exclaim. One exclamation mark across three full classic episodes.
• Never "Yet" as an opener. Effectively zero in the corpus, and the first word pastiche reaches for.
• Never ask rhetorical questions in bulk. Zero to five question marks per episode, and most are genuine setups answered by the next shot.
• Never use the past tense for what is happening now.
• Never restate the image.
• Never use an intensifier where a number belongs.
• Never name the narrator's feelings. Awe is produced by the fact, not asserted about the speaker.

How pastiche fails

• "Here we see" in the first sentence.
• Deliberate long-short alternation.
• Unrelenting irony.
• Mixing the three registers.
• Anthropomorphising with intent rather than with grammar.

Rules

• Flat declaratives, and let the range be wide
• Past tense, first person, and the narrator already knows
• Never open on a subordinate clause
• Feeling arrives as a physical fact
• Weather sets a clock, not a mood
• Rooms are inventoried, not evoked
• The narrator loses

Never

• Never present tense.
• Never name an emotion as it happens.
• Never explain the joke. The deadpan line is followed by the next piece of business.
• Never use an exclamation mark in narration. One appears in all of The Big Sleep.
• Never stack adjectives. Hammett introduces Spade in nouns and geometry and spends one adjective phrase at the end.
• Never let the narrator state his own decency. Chandler's own rule: honour "by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it."
• Never let the narrator come out clean.
• Never use the genre's furniture as scenery. The fedora, the neon and the venetian blinds belong to the adaptations. The prose names dairy trucks, a stamp collection, Twin Oaks Tavern.

How pastiche fails

• Simile inflation, twenty to forty times over.
• No baseline, so no rhythm.
• Vehicle drift.
• Mood substituted for event.
• Costume nouns instead of world nouns.
• Deadpan with no straight man.

Rules

• One change per line
• One grammatical shape per line type
• Numbers exactly, in one convention
• The direction verb carries the nerf
• The order never changes
• Deadpan beats a joke

Never

• Never joke on a security, data-loss or breaking-change entry. The funny products are silent exactly where the stakes are highest.
• Never joke on a nerf. It reads as gloating at the player it affects.
• Never write a fake entry. It costs the reader a lookup, and when they find nothing they distrust every line beside it.
• Never explain the joke, and never signal it with an emoji or a wink.
• Never announce enthusiasm. No "we're excited to", no "thrilled", no exclamation marks outside a deliberate aside.
• Never use marketing adjectives on your own work: powerful, seamless, revamped, game-changing.
• Never hedge a number.
• Never put justification inside an entry.
• Never use first person for the fix. "Fixed X", not "we went in and fixed X".
• Never joke about the team. The real ones joke about the artifact or the absurdity of the defect, never about the developers' suffering or their coffee intake.

How pastiche fails

• The ratio inverts.
• The joke replaces the fact.
• Length inflation.
• In-jokes needing context the reader lacks.
• Puns on the product name.
• Applied where nothing changed.

Rules

• Present tense is the spine
• Hold a long flat baseline
• Withhold the name, then spend it
• The release carries the meaning, not the peak
• One first person, once

Never

• Never explain the thing you just said. The release adds context; it does not paraphrase.
• Never narrate what the reader already has. Restating the table above the paragraph is the cardinal error.
• Never hedge at the moment. No "seems to", no "arguably", no "one of the". Hedges belong in the flat stretches, where they are honest and cost nothing.
• Never stack adjectives at the peak. Two superlatives in one sentence cancel.
• Never joke at the peak. Scully's jokes came a full minute later, in the reset.
• Never predict. The register is present tense and consequence-driven.
• Never be at maximum for long. Sustained peak is not intensity, it is flatness at a higher volume.

How pastiche fails

• No clock forces the compression.
• The reader controls the pace.
• There is no crowd.
• Preparation shows more in writing, not less.
• The vocative tic is the tell.