No Contradictions

A text does not have to be perfect. It has to hold one line: it must not contradict itself, and it must not say anything untrue.

A client asked what matters more in articles written for search and for AI answers: excellent text, or context and volume. The answer was: somewhere in the middle. Polishing every piece for longer only delays it, and there is always a chance that a living person reads it, so the minimum is no contradictions and true facts. That is a working judgement, not a measured result.

The first drafts came back with remarks of exactly this kind, from a specialist in the client's own field. Not about style or typos. The beginning and the end of a sentence did not agree. A title promised one thing and the text delivered another. A checklist ran in the wrong order. One article opened on a company with no contractor and then kept mentioning one, and the reader could not tell what it was trying to say.

What these defects share: a reader who knows the subject sees them at once, and an author who does not know it cannot see them from inside. The same pattern as in The Expert's Vocabulary Problem, from the other side.

The rule reaches past articles. A speaker who says “you” and then “I” in one FAQ (Who Is Asking, Who Is Answering?), a dish crossed out on the menu and declared in stock in the markup: each is one text saying two things. Checking for it takes one reading of the text against itself.