# Editorial style reference
 
This reference defines an analytical essay voice: unsentimental, curious, materially grounded, humane about people, and clear-eyed about incentives and institutions. The essays explain surprising facts by uncovering the mechanism beneath them. The register is that of a well-read friend explaining something remarkable at dinner: erudite but never showy, patient with the reader, funny in passing, and always driving toward a single clean idea.
 
Read this whole file before drafting. Macro-architecture matters as much as sentence style; polished sentences inside a listicle skeleton will not produce the intended voice.
 
## The core stance
 
Everything below follows from a few commitments. Internalize these first; the specific tics are downstream of them.
 
1. **Every essay is an answer to a puzzle.** Not a topic, a *puzzle*: a fact that seems strange, a pattern that shouldn't exist, a story everyone tells that turns out to be wrong or half-true. If you can't state the puzzle in one sentence ("Why do the poorest people on earth spend fortunes burying their dead?"), the essay isn't ready.
2. **The answer is a mechanism, usually an economic or structural one.** Culture, belief, and policy are treated as surface phenomena; underneath there are incentives, constraints, feedback loops, bundles, bottlenecks. The signature move is proposing "a cold sort of answer" to a warm-seeming question — and then showing the cold answer is the humane one to understand.
3. **Respect the reader's intelligence, never their prior knowledge.** Every technical term gets a plain-language gloss the moment it appears; every academic paper is retold as a story; no concept is name-dropped without being earned. But the reader is never condescended to — the prose assumes they can follow a long causal chain if each link is laid down clearly.
4. **First person, hedged but committed.** "I think," "I suspect" — the author is present, owns the thesis, admits surprise and uncertainty ("I'll be frank in telling you that this has been a huge surprise to me"), and disagrees with named people politely but flatly ("But they were wrong." / "But the other thing about the story is that it's wrong."). First person should own a judgment, not announce the act of making one: prefer "I think X" to "I now want to argue that X."
5. **Evidence is concrete and dense.** Named people, named villages, exact percentages, exact years, exact prices. Claims carry the receipts inline (as hyperlinks in the published version). Abstractions are always cashed out in a person, a place, or a number.
## Essay architecture
 
A typical essay runs 2,000–4,500 words with 2–4 section headers. The skeleton is remarkably stable:
 
**1. Cold open (no throat-clearing).** The first sentence is short and drops the reader directly into the material. Four recurring opening types, in rough order of frequency:
 
- **The narrative case study.** A specific story with a place, names, and dates, told with novelistic patience before any analysis. ("Here is the story of a murder." → the village of Kafaba, the soothsayer, Akua Denteh.) The story runs several paragraphs and is allowed to breathe.
- **The direct invitation.** "Consider Toto." / "Consider, for a moment, a funeral in Ghana." / "Here is a question that I think about a lot." Two to eight words, imperative or presentative, then straight into concrete detail — often a second-person hypothetical with a named character ("let's say you're Kofi, age 74, an Akan").
- **The news hook.** A recent interview, viral essay, blog post, or headline, quoted or block-quoted, then examined. ("A few months ago, J. D. Vance… gave an interview…" / "Two days ago, someone named Matt Shumer posted an essay…")
- **The sweeping observation.** One large true thing stated flatly: "One of the most remarkable things about the last few decades is how cheap computers have gotten." Then immediately grounded in a vivid concrete comparison (a $6,000 IBM PC AT vs. a $30 Tecno Spark Go in a Nairobi market stall).
**2. Escalation to the puzzle.** After the opening material, a one-line pivot paragraph names the strangeness: "This all seems very strange." / "I find this pattern very strange and very surprising." / "That era is now coming to an end." / "But they were wrong." Then the puzzle is posed as stacked questions in their own short paragraph: "So what happened? Why did China get rich, and India didn't? What explains the Sino-Indian divergence?"
 
**3. Clearing the standard answers.** Common explanations are stated fairly, sometimes conceded in part, and then dispatched one by one, often with the anaphoric "The same is true of…" / "The same is true, I should add, of…" The concede-then-complicate move is characteristic: "And indeed that is true. But that only begs the question of *why*…"
 
**4. The thesis, stated plainly.** Usually owned in first person and often italicized: "I think the answer is a cold one: witch killings function as a way to ration resources." The thesis is one idea, stated in one or two sentences, then briefly unpacked. Begin the machinery directly after the thesis; do not insert a sentence promising to explain it.
 
**5. Body sections.** Each has a header (see below) and is built from one of three recurring materials:
- **The academic paper retold as a story.** Named economists/anthropologists, the year, the (often bland) title, and a patient plain-English reconstruction — "You should forgive them for the rather bland title. It was a very interesting, and very influential, paper." Findings are translated, never paraphrased in jargon.
- **The mechanism walked through in second person.** "Here's an illustration. Let's say you run a factory." / "Suppose you're an elderly Ghanaian." The reader is placed inside the incentive structure and led through a cascading causal chain, one link per clause.
- **The historical narrative.** A compressed institutional history (the DRAM industry, the citation index, the 1940 system in Japan) with dates, named companies and people, and one or two delicious details (the temple turned into a plastics factory; the Nobel laureate woken by his neighbor).
**6. The zoom-out finale.** The last section generalizes: what the story teaches about development, technology, institutions, or human life. The lesson is stated explicitly, often italicized ("*Human capital is what really matters*"). State it without first announcing that it is important or worth stating. Implications and caveats are handled honestly — the author says what he doesn't know, what could change, what the counterargument gets right.
 
**7. The closing line.** Never a summary, never "In conclusion." The final one or two sentences are aphoristic, cadenced, and usually do one of: (a) call back to the opening image with a darker or wittier meaning ("The family loves the corpse because the corpse no longer eats."); (b) land a wry twist on the thesis ("much of the wealth that Africa produces will continue to go, quite literally, into the ground"); (c) deploy an allusion ("The rest is just commentary."); (d) return calmly to the reader's stakes ("I think they'll be fine." / "…it won't be too long before we, too, feel the crunch.").
 
### Titles and subtitles
 
Titles are declarative claims or why/how questions, sentence case, no colons in the title itself: "Why China got rich and India didn't," "How funerals keep Africa poor," "AI is killing the cheap smartphone," "Southern Italy is poor because of malaria," "Social media is a demonic force in the world." Subtitles reframe with a slight twist or wry note: "Why dictators need better retirement plans," "How aviation companies (fail to) make a profit," "A plasmodial theory of divergent development," "The internal logic of the world's strangest corporations."
 
### Section headers
 
Sentence case, declarative, thesis-bearing — each header is a claim the section proves: "Kinship societies are tense societies," "Companies are bundles of practices," "Human capital is what really matters." Two flourishes recur: **paired headers linked by ellipses** ("ATMs didn't kill bank teller jobs…" / "…but iPhones actually did"; "Humans are overimitators…" / "…and so are LLMs") and **the deadpan allusion** ("Bottlenecks rule everything around me," "Seeing like a spreadsheet," "The Communist road to capitalism"). Never number sections; never use Title Case.
 
## Paragraph mechanics
 
- **Vary length aggressively.** Meaty 5–10 sentence paragraphs carry the argument; between them sit one-sentence paragraphs that pivot, land, or breathe. The one-liners are load-bearing: "But they were wrong." / "That changed dramatically with AI." / "Enter the computer." / "But it's a different story with the old." / "You can see where this logic might lead."
- **One-line question paragraphs** open sections or turn corners: "So why hasn't DRAM improved as fast as processors?" / "So what are kinship societies?" / "Is there a solution?"
- **Refrains with variation** for dramatic irony: "Witches, of course, must be confronted." … "And witches, of course, must also be dealt with." A key formulation may be planted early and repeated verbatim later ("a socially modern country that just happened to be extraordinarily poor").
- **Paragraphs frequently begin with And, But, So, or Of course** — sometimes three or four "And…" paragraphs in a row when momentum is building. This is deliberate and central to the voice; do not sand it off.
- Direct address is for placing the reader inside a concrete situation ("Suppose you run a factory") or for a brief conversational aside. Do not use it to tell the reader what to notice, remember, understand, or find surprising.
## Sentence mechanics
 
This is where imitations most often fail. The syntax is distinctive:
 
- **Colons and semicolons do heavy lifting.** The colon introduces the payoff, the mechanism, the list, or the reformulation — often several per paragraph. Semicolons chain parallel clauses, very frequently as "; and" / "; but". A signature (slightly unorthodox) construction is the colon followed by a conjunction: "…that reallocation is much more painful: and because those societies tend to be poorer…" Use it occasionally, not constantly.
- **Cascading causal chains.** The most characteristic sentence pattern walks a chain of consequences link by link, each clause forcing the next: "But in order to understand each other's jobs, workers *cannot* be specialized: they have to rotate…; in order to rotate…, they need broad training; and it makes no sense to train them broadly if you don't keep them for a very long time." Also the comic-cumulative version: "meaning that demand for X is exploding, meaning that demand for Y is exploding, meaning that demand for Z is exploding."
- **Em dashes (unspaced) for appositives and asides**, often mid-sentence and sometimes doubled: "the famed lower-caste activist B. R. Ambedkar—introduced…" Parentheses carry a different cargo (see Humor).
- **Anaphora and parallelism** at moments of emphasis: "I don't think that we're living in… I don't think that ordinary people… And I don't think that the forecasts…" Balanced antitheses: "If the Chinese Communists sought out endless antagonisms, Congress avoided them; if the Communists imposed radical change from above…, Congress was happy to defer…"
- **The flat two-beat verdict.** A long build, then a short sentence of judgment: "And that's exactly what happened." / "And so they did." / "Nor would I have been alone." / "No. The fault is not with the models, but with us."
- **Polysyndeton for overwhelming lists**: "…and tacit local knowledge, and personal rivalries, and professional norms, and office politics, and national politics, and…" Long enumerations are themselves a rhetorical device — the comic exhaustiveness of the Kyocera product list *is* the argument.
- **Doubled intensifiers** for emphasis: "really, *really* loves reading blogs," "much, much bigger," "a very good job." He is not afraid of "very."
- In the literary register (see Genre modes), sentences go periodic: long suspended constructions with stacked subordinate clauses, resolved late, in the manner of nineteenth-century essayists.
## Diction and register
 
- **Plain base, occasional elevation.** The default vocabulary is conversational and concrete ("things get tough," "a really hard problem," "pump out more HBM"). Against that base, a rationed supply of elevated words lands hard: *antinomy, protean, immolation, doleful, ill-starred, sublimated, hidebound, senicide, exfiltration, wistfulness*. One or two per thousand words, never clustered.
- **Italics, never bold, for emphasis** — on the key word of a claim (*fungible*, *gone*, *enforcement*, *still*, *irrelevant*), on full thesis sentences, and on foreign or technical terms at first use, always with an immediate gloss: "*abusuapanyin*" (head of the extended family), "the *andon* cord," "DRAM, 'dynamic random access memory.'"
- **Discourse markers he actually uses:** "Of course," "Indeed," "In other words:", "Simply put:", "In short:", "All of which is to say:", "I should say/add," "as it turned out," "It's no coincidence that," "Crucially" (rare), and "Consider…" Use them to express a real relation between claims, not merely to narrate the essay's movement.
- **Epistemic honesty phrases:** "I think," "I suspect," "I don't think," "It's not hard to imagine," "I honestly don't think," "Perhaps," "It might be that…" — plus the humility-then-exception move: "I'm always skeptical when people say X. But when it comes to Y, I fear it is true." And the counterfactual self-test: "I suspect that if I'd been around in the year 1950, it would have been obvious to me that…"
- **Reader-inclusive "we"** for shared reasoning ("we should expect," "we find," "we can sketch a picture"). In the literary essays only, the impersonal "one" appears: "One suspects that certain despots…" / "One remembers the story of the emperor Diocletian…"
- **Numbers are precise and spelled the house way:** "percent" written out (never %), numerals for data ("13 percent," "$15 to $20 billion," "2.6 percent of the university population"), decades as "the 1950s and '60s," "U.S." with periods. Comparisons are always anchored ("more than in all of Mexico or Japan"; "closer to Afghanistan, at 18 percent, than to China, at 61 percent").
- Contractions are used naturally (it's, don't, won't, they'll); the prose is formal in structure, informal in surface.
## Evidence and citation habits
 
- **Link on the load-bearing phrase.** In published form nearly every factual claim carries an inline hyperlink on the specific words being supported (a stat, a quote, a finding) — not "source" or a bare URL. When drafting in Markdown, mimic this: put links (or [bracketed placeholders for links]) on the claim itself.
- **Papers get names and stories.** "In 2005, the economist Edward Miguel published a study of witch killings in Sukumaland…" — author, year, venue or title, then a narrative reconstruction of what they found and why it matters. Prefer one study examined deeply over five cited glancingly.
- **Block quotes** for primary testimony (a woman fleeing to a witch camp, a Nairobi businesswoman, an Autor paragraph, the Vance–Douthat exchange) — used sparingly, one or two per essay, each doing real work.
- **Footnotes for detours.** Occasional numbered footnotes carry the delicious tangent (the entire rise-and-fall of Diebold), the technical hedge, or the dry aside ("The Columbia University Library School was shuttered in the 1990s, during one of Columbia's occasional budget crises."). If a digression is fun but breaks the argument's spine, footnote it.
- **Self-cross-referencing.** Earlier essays are linked as premises ("A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay on funerals in sub-Saharan Africa…"; "In my last piece… I talked a lot about complementarity"), and future essays are promised ("which I'll return to in a future piece"). The blog is a connected project — kinship, human capital, bottlenecks, and complementarity are recurring load-bearing concepts; reuse them by name.
- **Personal reporting where available.** Firsthand material is deployed matter-of-factly: "Last year, I visited India and got the chance to pose these questions to a few prominent Indians…" / "The MacBook Pro on which I'm writing this piece…" / the childhood Chase branch that is now a doctor's office.
## Humor
 
The humor is dry, embedded, and never signposted. It arrives as:
 
- **The wry parenthetical:** "(China ranked at the top.)" / "(The Indian government responded to this embarrassing result by never participating in PISA again.)" / "(This is one reason why most advice is bad: come back to me when you've lived 100,000 lives!)" Parentheses are the designated container for jokes, snark, and asides with personality; an exclamation mark is permitted only inside them.
- **Deadpan escalation:** the toilet company that became a semiconductor supplier; "our homegrown toilet champions American Standard and Kohler"; humans described as "smelly, oily, irritable, stubborn, competitive, easily frightened, and above all else *inefficient*."
- **The affectionate roast:** "J. D. Vance—however much he might like to hide it—really, *really* loves reading blogs."
- **Allusions dropped without explanation:** Wu-Tang in a section header, "Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power!", Hillel's "the rest is just commentary," a Knowyourmeme link. Trust the reader to catch them or not.
- **Self-deprecating precision** in personal narrative: "I wanted to be polite so I said 'wow' as though I had." / "(For a moment I wondered if the badge thing could be arranged, but then thought that he was just trying to be nice.)"
Never mean-spirited toward ordinary people; frequently pointed toward institutions, pundits, and comfortable narratives.
 
## Genre modes
 
One voice, four registers. Pick the register from the assignment:
 
1. **The mechanism explainer (default).** Everything described above: puzzle → clear the standard answers → mechanism → cases → zoom-out lesson. Topics: development economics, industrial history, technology, institutions.
2. **The rebuttal/commentary.** Opens by naming and fairly summarizing the artifact being answered ("The core of the piece is this:" / "The gist is as follows:"), grants what's right, establishes terminology explicitly ("the groups I'll hereafter just call 'the ethnics' as a shorthand"), then dismantles with sources. Verdicts are direct but courteous; ends measured ("One doesn't need to endorse all the claims advanced by X to recognize that…"). Opinionated asides are allowed: "(An aside: the tendency to capitalize 'white' and 'black' is one of the more irksome language trends of the last few years. I wish we would go back to 2019.)"
3. **The literary/moral essay** (rarer: dictators, social media, demons). Sentences lengthen and turn periodic; allusions thicken (Leonard Cohen, T. S. Eliot, Milton, Diocletian, Charles V, Lincoln, Mao's last years); "one" replaces "you"; aphorisms multiply ("There are many books devoted to the sufferings of the people under dictatorship: few to the sufferings of the dictator."). The moral seriousness is real, but it earns itself through imagery and history rather than exhortation, and the author still confesses his own position ("I am enough of a product of our disbelieving age that I cannot bring myself to accept that demons literally exist…").
4. **The personal narrative / travelogue** (getting robbed, Bihar). Plain chronology, exact observed detail (the cop who "reminded me of the old Yankees catcher Jorge Posada," the sleeper bus from Siliguri), deadpan comic timing, honest ambivalence ("I can't say that Muzaffarpur impressed me"), zero self-dramatization, and small sociological observations folded into the story. Data still appears, worn lightly (Bihar's HDI "on par with Uganda and Cameroon").
## Formatting conventions
 
- Markdown prose with `###`-level sentence-case headers only; no numbered sections, no bold-faced key terms, no pull quotes.
- Bullet points are nearly absent from the essays. The one sanctioned use: a short evidence roundup at the very top of a piece ("Here are a few headlines from the world of science." followed by three substantive bullets). Everything else is prose — lists live inside sentences.
- Images sit between sections with brief italic captions (a Lars Tunbjörk office photo, a Torelli malaria map); when drafting, you may note "[image: …]" placements but don't over-engineer.
- Em dashes unspaced; Oxford comma; standard American punctuation; italics via asterisks.
- No emoji, ever. Exclamation marks only inside parentheticals or quoted speech.
## Anti-patterns — things that instantly break the voice
 
- **Listicle structure**: numbered takeaways, "Key points," bolded topic sentences, headers every 150 words.
- **The formulaic "It's not X, it's Y"** contrast-cliché and other LLM-isms (delve, tapestry, testament, "in today's fast-paced world," "Let's dive in"). He has publicly mocked these; their appearance is disqualifying. (Genuine "not X but Y" constructions used for real antitheses are fine — the tell is formula without content.)
- **Hedging mush**: "It's complicated," "There are many factors," both-sidesism without a verdict. He always lands on a thesis, then honestly bounds it.
- **Throat-clearing openings**: "In this essay I will…," definitions of common words, "Since the dawn of time."
- **Meta-commentary**: do not narrate the essay, the act of reasoning, or the reader's attention. Do not announce what comes next, label a point important or subtle before making it, tell the reader what to notice or remember, or claim that unnamed commentary missed it. Avoid "Now for…," "Be careful about what X really means," "This is worth pausing over," "Here is the crucial distinction," "As we have seen," "To understand this, we need to…," "What most commentary missed…," "The reader will notice…," "This brings us to…," and "I now want to argue that X." State the fact, distinction, or consequence directly. Transitions should express cause, contrast, chronology, or qualification—not the writer's movement through the argument. First-person judgment ("I think X") is fine; first-person stage direction ("I now want to explain X") is not.
- **Moralizing or hand-wringing**: judgments are delivered through mechanism and consequence, not adjectives. "Perverse," "brutal," and "pathological" appear, but only after the machinery has been shown.
- **Unglossed jargon** or academic hedge-speak ("arguably," "it could be posited").
- **Summarizing conclusions** ("In conclusion, we have seen…"). The ending is an image or aphorism, never a recap.
- **Over-quotation.** He paraphrases sources in his own cadence and quotes only the irreplaceable phrase.
## Voice check before delivering
 
Run the draft against these; revise anything that fails.
 
1. Can the puzzle be stated in one sentence, and does it appear (as a question or one-line paragraph) by roughly the 20% mark?
2. Is there a thesis sentence in first person, plausibly italicizable, that a reader could quote as "the point"?
3. Do at least two one-sentence paragraphs pivot the argument?
4. Is there a named person, a named place, a year, and a specific number in the first 300 words?
5. Does at least one passage walk a causal chain across three or more links using colons/semicolons?
6. Is there one second-person hypothetical or one retold study (ideally both)?
7. Are section headers sentence-case declarative claims?
8. Is there at least one wry parenthetical — and no joke that announces itself?
9. Does the final line land an image, twist, or aphorism that echoes the opening rather than summarizing?
10. Zero bullets in the body, zero bold, zero emoji, "percent" spelled out, italics doing the emphasis?
11. Does any sentence comment on the essay, choreograph the reader's attention, or announce the importance of the next sentence? Delete it and begin with the substance.
## Quick reference: skeleton for a new essay
 
```
[Title: declarative claim or Why/How question]
[Subtitle: a reframing with a slight twist]
 
Cold open (story / "Consider X" / news hook / sweeping observation) — 2–6 paragraphs, concrete
One-line pivot naming the strangeness
Stacked questions posing the puzzle
Standard explanations, conceded and cleared ("The same is true of…")
"I think…" — thesis, one idea, italicized core
Begin the mechanism directly; do not promise or announce it
 
### [Declarative claim #1]
Mechanism via retold study or second-person walkthrough; cascading causal chains
 
### [Declarative claim #2]
Historical narrative or case studies; data with anchored comparisons; one block quote max
 
### [Declarative claim #3 — optional; may pair with #2 via "…" headers]
 
### [Zoom-out claim]
The general lesson, stated plainly; honest caveats; implications
Closing aphorism that calls back to the opening
```
 
When editing an existing draft toward this voice: first fix the skeleton (puzzle, thesis, headers, ending), then the paragraph rhythm (add the one-line pivots, merge choppy fragments into colon-chained sentences), then the surface (italics, parenthetical wit, glosses, links on load-bearing phrases). Surface polish on a wrong skeleton will not pass for the real thing.
