How a brief is written

What a brief is

A brief answers one question, at one place on the site, and stays there. It is not an article that gets replaced by a newer article on the same topic; it is the page for that question, rewritten when there is reason to. That is why every brief carries a revision date and no publication date: the useful fact is when the argument last changed, not when a file was first created.

How the question is chosen

Each brief covers a question that a practitioner actually has to answer — which vocabulary fits a design decision, whether learner control will help this group, what a findings chapter must refuse to do. Questions that are only interesting to the literature are left to the literature.

Sourcing

Sources are cited at the sentence that needs them, not gathered into a list at the foot of the page to signal diligence. Where a claim rests on a specific piece of work, that work is named in the text or in the works-referred-to list; where a claim is a general reading of a literature, it is stated as that rather than attached to a single citation it cannot carry.

We do not invent references, and we do not cite a work we have not read to the depth the claim requires. Where the underlying evidence is weaker than the claim usually made from it, the brief says so, including in cases where the weaker reading is less useful.

What a verdict means

Most briefs open with a short verdict block: the question, a short answer, and a statement of confidence. The confidence line is not decoration. It distinguishes between claims that would survive a determined critic, claims that are contested in the literature, and claims that are widely repeated with little behind them. Where the honest verdict is that the evidence is too thin to act on, that is published as a verdict rather than omitted.

Revision

A brief is revised when one of four things happens: the evidence changes, a reader shows that an argument does not hold, a distinction turns out to be doing more work than the text gave it, or something stated as settled proves to be contested. Revisions are logged with what changed, in the revision log, so a reader who acted on an earlier version can see what moved.

Corrections of fact are made in place and noted. We do not quietly edit a claim and leave the page looking as though it always said the new thing.

Who writes this

An editorial team, unsigned. There is no author byline because the briefs are not personal essays and no individual's authority is being offered as a reason to believe them; the sourcing is. Unsigned also means no fabricated credentials, which some sites in this genre supply and which we consider worse than anonymity.

Independence

What a brief covers is decided by the argument, and where a work is named it is because the argument needed it. No arrangement with any programme, publisher or provider bears on what is written here or on which titles appear in it.

Scope

• Standing questions. A brief exists to answer one, and is revised when the evidence moves rather than on a schedule.
• Argued selection. The reading a brief names is the reading its argument needs, which is deliberately shorter than the literature.
• General guidance. Regulations, contracts and local conditions override anything here, and any brief that touches them says so.
• The catalogue is elsewhere. This domain formerly hosted an academic publisher's catalogue. Those books belong to their publishers, and none of that material is reproduced here. See what happened to the catalogue.

Corrections and disagreement

If a brief is wrong, the useful form of that message is which sentence, and why. A specific objection with a source attached changes pages here; a general disagreement about emphasis usually does not, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

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Include the page and the sentence, and the source that settles it if you have one. What changes as a result is entered in the revision log with the date and what moved.