The banned list
Words and shapes this newspaper will not use in its own voice, and the reason it will not use them.
Since 2022 a set of words has been used so heavily by machines that a reader now recognises them before finishing the sentence. One study put delve at roughly twenty-five times its previous rate in academic writing. Showcasing and underscores each ran at about nine times. These are not bad words. They were ordinary words, and then something happened to them.
This paper has a particular problem with that, because it is a paper about the machines, written partly by one, and it declines to say in what proportion. If it also wrote like one it would have answered the question by accident, and the question is the point.
So the list below is barred from the narration. It is not barred from the people the paper quotes. A head of alignment saying “we are leveraging a robust framework to unlock transformative value” is this paper working exactly as intended, and the ban is on the sentence around him, not on him. Every word here is available to any character who deserves it.
These announce themselves. If one appears in the narration it is an error, not a choice.
The promotional register. Individually defensible, and they arrive in pairs: robust framework, seamless integration, meticulously crafted. Two of them in a paragraph and the paragraph is selling something.
Formal connectives stacked at the top of consecutive paragraphs produce a rhythm no person writes in.
Phrases that have stopped carrying meaning.
The shapes, which matter more
A writer told to avoid delve will avoid delve and keep every one of these. The vocabulary is the easy half.
It is not X, it is Y
The negative-parallel reveal. "This is not a product launch. It is a confession." Once a piece does it, it does it four times.
No X. No Y. Just Z.
Three fragments doing the work of one sentence. Reads as gravitas and is punctuation.
The rule of three, unearned
A third item added because two felt short. The third is almost always the weakest and can go.
The result? A line break.
Fake suspense built out of a question mark and white space.
The em dash
Set without spaces, between clauses, where a comma or a full stop would do. This paper has banned it outright since it was founded.
Announcing the stakes
"Here is why that matters." If it matters the piece will show it, and if it does not the sentence will not save it.
The exception
All of it is permitted ironically, which in practice means: inside quotation marks, said by somebody who means it, in a piece that knows they mean it. That is not a loophole. It is most of what this paper is for.
Additions are welcome and will be considered by the Chief Sub-editor, who has never once accepted one. The list is checked against every draft before it runs. It has never been passed first time.