Blog register — working notes made legible, shipped provisional

Status: locked 2026-07-02, end of day. The register was validated against “Rebuilding 頓” and the provisional stamp is off. Three final calibrations came with the lock: the first sentence is the post’s harshest position, so it opens by normalizing the problem with the “you” dose entering after; the opener also takes a run-up — a scoping clause before the claim (“Among people who read Chinese, even fluent native speakers, it’s common to…”), because a one-clause opener stays abrupt even when it normalizes (Wedge struck his own proposal as too short); and a transparent term of art may stand bare (“the method does have a floor”) when the following sentences supply the meaning — an inline definition that breaks the flow costs more than it adds.

Verdict: The blog calibration in 02 - System/Writing Standards.md is replaced. “Second person is fine; the post talks to a reader trying to do the thing” (2026-06-30) is struck. The new register: a blog post is the author’s notebook cleaned up until a stranger can follow it — no “you,” no imperatives, no rhetorical questions, no lecturing; the reader overhears and is never addressed; and (amended same day, below) no “I” either — the register is agentless. Provisional until validated against one real blog post.

Why the reversal

Wedge’s direction, stated 2026-07-02: he does not want to talk to a reader trying to do the thing, does not want to lecture, prefers show over tell, and wants posts that sound like he is talking mostly to himself while selling nothing. The old allowance pulled the opposite way — a second-person how-to voice is a lecture stance however plain the words.

The system was already converging here without saying so. The Tsumugu entry register bans instruction verbs (“Picture…”, “Imagine…”), patronizing asides (“that’s the clue”), and product self-talk (PRD-Entry-Authoring §0.6, STYLE-CARD). No document stated the register affirmatively; a survey of tsumugu, tsumugu-core, tsumugu-ed, and wnac on 2026-07-02 found only verbatim mirrors of the old standard. The new section codifies the convergence rather than importing anything new.

Amended same day: the register is agentless

The first draft of the section carried “first person for what the author did and saw.” Struck hours later at Wedge’s direction: no “I” in his normal writing either — persons bypassed on both sides of the page. The replacement grammar: events and artifacts take the subject position (the form stops, the list collects, the recovery takes a minute), appearance verbs carry experience without an experiencer (looks wrong, feels familiar), recognition itself acts, light passives hold background facts, actions nominalize. The fix for a struck “you” or “I” is an event or artifact subject, never “one.” The IME Method validation post was rewritten to this register the same day.

A second same-day amendment: the post’s shape is whole–part–whole. The agentless draft opened directly on the 頓 episode with its pinyin glosses, and Wedge read it as a sharp drop — not a hook problem, an orientation problem. The fix came from his own teaching technique (WPW, owned publicly by the wiki’s WPW page, sourced privately in the ICS corpus): the lead states the plain big picture the example lives in, specifics ramp after it, each part connects back as it enters, and the post returns to the whole to close. Reverse Explanation rides along as a rule: mechanism first, label last. Both are now in the provisional blog section.

A third same-day amendment: density is not signal. The WPW-shaped draft still read as doctrine — every sentence load-bearing, zero connective tissue, “the test case was 頓” landing with no bridge. Wedge’s ruling: the thoughts keep their high-signal nature, and the audience is a learner at an unknown point in the journey, so the delivery paces for the newest plausible reader. Compressed claims unpack over two or three sentences, terms are explained before they do any work, and transitions plus breathing room around dense gloss-runs are work, not filler. The paired test now in the section: every fact survives the high-signal sweep, and every paragraph survives being read aloud to someone new to the topic.

A fourth same-day amendment, in two parts. Second person returns with one narrow job: stating a problem the reader will recognize as their own experience (“You can know a character and still be unable to write it”). The full ban lasted a few hours and produced stiffness (“a character can be well known and still fail at the pen”); Wedge’s ruling separates recognition of shared experience, which is welcome, from instruction and advice voice, which stay banned. And harshness is now a named register fault: clipped verdict-sentences pile into doctrine, so sentence length varies like speech, and the close shows the episode resolving in scene terms instead of stating its moral. The post’s ending moved from “the sound and the meaning were holding it the whole time” (telling) to the pen finishing the character (showing).

A fifth and closing amendment: eight principles from the final calibration round, inferred from Wedge’s line edits and confirmed by him one by one. (1) Second person is a dose, not a mode — one “you” establishes recognition, repetition turns it back into address. (2) Modality is gentleness done honestly — contingent things get “can” and “might,” which describe the world rather than grading the author’s confidence. (3) No appended verdicts (“…and fairly”). (4) No punchline landings (“that’s the answer”) including the paradox-flip. (5) No self-referential apparatus (“in the notes this is called”). (6) Parallel structure must add information. (7) Natural collocation outranks the person ban — “came up for handwriting” loses to a natural second-person-plus-modal sentence. (8) The governing hierarchy: flow is the objective, high signal is the filter; when compression fights natural flow, flow wins, because a human reads the post. All eight are in the section; the 頓 post was rewritten wholesale under them.

A sixth amendment, closing the calibration: six more principles from Wedge’s line edits, all confirmed. (9) The possessive is the low-dose second person — “your pen” anchors the scene without spending a “you.” (10) Concrete verbs over generic ones — stick and slip over stay and go. (11) Personification must map the mechanism, not decorate — “the form slips away” describes forgetting; “頓 had never left” dressed up a fact for warmth. (12) Frequency honesty — “usually” and “often” over “never” and “always” on contingent claims. (13) No replay — nothing restated that the reader just watched, from the doubled character name up to the coda paragraph. (14) Mode switches marked — one plain sentence when a hypothetical becomes an actual episode. Plus two WPW clarifications, the second correcting the first. The close returns to the same whole that opened the post — and returning is not restating: a close that merely re-said the opening was struck as weak. The final paragraph is the opening’s big picture advanced by the part, the problem now solvable and the learning goal moved (the 頓 close: stalls stay common, but a stall becomes a minute of retrieval practice and the rebuilt character is harder to lose). The lead gained its own calibration the same round: the whole may open by normalizing the problem — how common it is, native speakers included — which widens the picture past the single reader and softens the drop. The post was scrapped and rewritten clean under the finished set.

A closing calibration on vocabulary: plain words are for delivery, not for erasing precision. Wedge’s field is learning science and the posts are learning-science posts, so the domain term that carries the mechanism beats the general word (“retrieval,” not “recovery”) — in doses, each clear from context or given its clause. Over-plaining goes so general the post loses the details that matter. Terms of art wearing plain clothes (“the method has a floor”) get one explaining clause on first use, same as any term.

Guards written into the section

Two failure modes are named in the rule itself. Passive mush (“it could be argued,” “it was found”) hides an agent the sentence still needs; the fix is a concrete event subject, not a restored person. Person-free prose also drifts toward the generic how-to voice when the specific episode evaporates; the worked example stays a particular recovery told as events. Self-talk without the “legible” half decays into private shorthand; the notebook still defines terms inline, carries one worked example through, and stops when the example is fully worked. The try-it want is deleted: a notebook wants nothing, including that the method be tried.

Price and flip condition

The price: some sentences run stiffer with “you” and “I” both struck, and the how-to genre loses its two most natural grammatical stances. The fix is an event or artifact subject, never “one.” What would flip this back: the validation post reads mannered or evasive — passive mush, or a notebook performing notebook-ness — in which case a person returns in some narrower form.

Same-day rulings alongside

Em-dash ban’s recorded rationale: pragmatic, not aesthetic — model prose overuses the dash past per-line judgment, so a total cut is the only enforceable fix. Reveal ban promoted from Front-Facing into Wiki pages. Condensed invariants/dated-tactics split scoped to fast-moving domains only. “Checkable Use” renamed to Checkable Expectations. Delete List made canonical in one place.

Open

Validation post not yet chosen (the 2026-06-30 blog backlog is the pool; the IME Method draft is the standing candidate since its 頓 example is already the standard’s own exemplar). The two verbatim mirrors (tsumugu-core/Writing-Standards.md, tsumugu/personal/research/Writing Standards.md) are now stale and await a stub-to-pointer decision. The Condensed spec still says “bold one-paragraph compression” while no shipped page bolds it. The mass rewrite (Condensed pages, front-facing surfaces, Home-linked pages) waits on the register test.