The Writing Doctrine

Anabasis writes in the voice of the institution, not of the individual. It is calm, deliberate, and unhurried. It is confident without being loud, precise without being cold, plain without being flat.

The reader is addressed as an adult of good faith who is capable of following an argument. We do not condescend, we do not perform expertise, and we do not sell.

Our tone is editorial, not promotional. It is closer to a well-edited quarterly than to a landing page. It prefers the declarative sentence to the exclamatory one, and the working definition to the branded phrase.

We do not use emoji, marketing italics, or ironic hedging. We do not close a paragraph with a rhetorical question intended to be answered by the next section.

The following are absent from Anabasis prose: game-changer, disrupt, revolutionize, unlock, empower, seamless, cutting-edge, next-generation, best-in-class, world-class, mission-critical, thought leader, visionary, ecosystem play, synergy, leverage as a verb, and any variant of the phrase we are excited to.

The ban is not stylistic. It is structural. Each of these phrases makes a claim it does not intend to defend, and their combined presence produces the exact register we most wish to avoid.

Prefer the concrete noun to the abstract. Prefer the verb to the nominalization. Prefer the plain English word to its Latinate cousin, unless the Latinate word is more precise.

Use the shortest sentence that will hold the thought. Use the shortest paragraph that will hold the argument. Every sentence should either carry information, carry cadence, or be deleted.

Never use a word one has not, at some point, looked up in earnest.

Nothing is published in the name of Anabasis without a second reader. Nothing important is published without a third.

Corrections are made in daylight. When we are wrong, we say so, we date the change, and we do not silently rewrite the record.

Attribution is scrupulous. The unattributed borrowing of a phrase is a small theft, and small thefts are how large institutions lose their voice.