voice

Estate writing convention for anything that leaves the Den. Applies to MR/PR descriptions, commit messages, issue replies, runbooks, README prose, customer-facing advisories, and any markdown shipped or sent to humans outside this project.

Internal prep docs, cadence notes, and research drafts are exempt.

Rules

No em-dashes (—), double-dashes (--), or spaced hyphens (-) as connectors. Use a comma, a period, or restructure. These read as filler, and some platforms also reflow them awkwardly across line breaks.
No hard-wrapped paragraphs in GitHub / GitLab comments, MRs, PRs, issues, or release notes. Those platforms reflow markdown prose; hard-wraps render as mid-sentence breaks at unrelated column widths. Hard-wraps in code blocks and prose-in-source-files are fine.
No words that announce themselves: "comprehensive," "robust," "robust and comprehensive," "leverage," "synergy," "best-in-class," "tap into." Replace with the concrete thing the word was trying to flatter.
Direct subject + verb. "We chose Ory because UX." Not "Ory was selected through a process that considered several factors."
Avoid hedging unless the hedge is the point. "May" and "might" are fine when the uncertainty is real. They drift in when nothing is being said.
Lead with the action item. First sentence answers "what should you do with this?" not "let me set the context."

What this standard checks

Generated from ./check.sh, in the order the check runs them.

assertion	target	pattern or value	note
file does not match	`README.md`	`—\|[[:alpha:]] -- [[:alpha:]]\|[[:alnum:]] - [[:alpha:]]`	dash-joined clauses are the estate's plainest tell of prose nobody edited

How to satisfy

check.sh grades README.md only. Every other shipped markdown file described above holds to these rules by review, the same way hard-wrap detection is left to review rather than mechanized.

Deviations

Repos with no human-facing prose surface (config-only, schema-only) declare a deviation against the README.md assertion.