# restrained, not salesy

Show the artifact, don't sell it. Persuasion verbs, claim headlines, and metric flourish get stripped before anything ships.

## What it is
A register rule for everything I put in front of people: editorial restraint over persuasion. If a section is arguing rather than showing, it's wrong. The failure mode is a generated 'impressive' version — ad-copy headlines, persuasion verbs, metrics as decoration — where the work should carry the point.

## Why
Selling reads as insecurity; restraint reads as confidence. Every time generated copy argued for the work instead of showing it, it got rejected — the register that survives is the one where the artifact carries the point.

## How Andrew uses it
Before producing, open the actual reference and match it rather than inventing a voice. A word-level diff guards ported copy — a delegated port once swapped honest phrasing for persuasion words while staying structurally correct, and only a register check caught it. The lint runs on every content file this page is built from.

## How to get it
The whole method is downloadable and adaptable — `rules/restrained-not-salesy.md` inside the zip, with the banned-vocabulary list this very page is linted against.

_Distilled from: ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md § Restrained, not salesy_
