Handbook · Writing
Writing with the lamp
How the margin behaves: select, ask, accept, refuse. Nothing finishes itself.
The lamp is not a colleague. It is a light you can aim.
Select a sentence
The lamp only answers a selection. If nothing is selected, the shutter will not open. This is deliberate. A model with the whole document will fill the whole document.
Ask
Three asks are enough for most mornings:
- Is this claim sourced?
- Are these two sentences doing the same job?
- Is there a plainer verb?
You may write your own ask. The studio will not autocomplete the question.
Accept or refuse
Accepted lines become ink in the body. Refused lines leave the margin. There is no museum of discarded completions unless you keep one yourself.
Reading aloud
If the studio is on a machine with a microphone, you may read a paragraph and let the lamp mark hesitations. Marks are not corrections. They are a map. See Reading aloud to the model.