---
title: Source material
description: Which external writing patterns this skill adopted, which it declined, and the measurement behind each decision
---

# Source material

Two external writing skills were read on 2026-08-19 as source material for this one. The first catalogs 31 patterns of machine-sounding prose. The second layers document mode, sentence construction, information density, and ambiguity prevention.

Neither was imported wholesale, and one measurement settles why. Read this before adding a rule from outside this corpus, and extend the position below rather than deriving a second one.

## What was adopted

Roughly half the pattern catalog had no counterpart in this corpus, and six of those patterns are now in `machine-tells.md`: rule-of-three, synonym cycling, false ranges, inline-header lists, adverb propping, and passive voice with an unnamed actor. Each is a shape rather than a token, which is what kept it out of a ban list that matches words.

The density layer had no counterpart at all and is now `density.md`. Its useful half is the split between what a compression pass may cut and what it may not, since a terse register already instructs a session to cut and names nothing that has to survive.

The ambiguity rules travel with that layer for the same reason. Compression is what creates the ambiguity, so a rule about pronouns and modifiers belongs beside the rule that shortened the sentence.

## What was declined

- **The ban on abstract metaphor nouns.** The nouns it names are load-bearing terms in this corpus rather than decoration, and the count below is what decides it.
- **Document mode as a selector.** The source has the writer pick a mode before drafting. In this corpus a document's shape is already fixed by the standard governing its type, so a mode selector adds a second authority over one question and the two will disagree.
- **Any restatement of a banned word set.** The bans ship as package data that `aitk markdown audit` reads, and a copy here would be a second source for one list with a machine reading the other.
- **A voice register per surface.** One baseline covers every surface. A surface needing a warmer register states its own voice and claims the yield, which lifts voice alone and leaves the bans, the rhythm rules, and the tells in force.

The first of those four rests on a count. The source names `surface` among the nouns it bans, and tracked markdown in the authoring repository used `surface` 593 times, `harness` 95, `scaffolding` 17, and `primitive` 4, measured at `57ee7467` on 2026-08-19. Adopting the item either rewrites established vocabulary across the corpus or is ignored in silence, and a reader arriving later cannot tell which happened.

## Where this diverges

The source material treats repetition of a noun as a defect. This skill treats it as precision and bans the synonym cycling that avoids it, which reverses the item for reference prose where a reader has to know that two names are one thing.

The source material also prefers shorter sentences without bound. This skill measures the spread instead, since a passage of uniformly short sentences is the reported failure rather than the fix for it.

## The industry-guide record

The cadence rules and the bans they pair with trace to three industry style guides, being Google's developer documentation style guide, Microsoft's writing style guide, and Apple's style guide. The authoring toolkit keeps the per-rule attributions and the dates each guide was read, and no install carries that record, so this file is the position a target reads.