restrained, not salesy

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.

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.

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.

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.