A working glossary

Plain definitions for the terms used across these documents

Most of the vocabulary in this subject is used in at least two incompatible ways, and it is easier to state which one is meant here than to keep qualifying it. These are working definitions for reading the practice documents, not claims about how the words should be used elsewhere.

Ask

A unit that requires the reader to decide something — to submit, choose, commit or continue. Distinguished from a unit that informs, which requires nothing.

Branding

What a name carries into a sentence before the sentence has done any work: recognition, a rough category, and at best a disposition about how the thing behind the name behaves.

Cold read

Reading a unit as someone with no prior exposure to the name, the category or the preceding material, in order to see what the unit establishes on its own.

Collection structure

A sequence whose steps extract something before allowing passage, as distinct from one whose steps advance an argument. Both are measurable; only the second improves when the reasoning improves.

Dependency

A relationship in which a unit only functions if the reader retained something from an earlier one. Dependencies are where sequences break under traffic that arrives out of order.

Journey map

A description of the questions a reader holds while deciding, in the order the questions become live. Frequently drawn instead as a description of screens, which records position rather than decision.

Measure

In typographic use, the width of a line of text expressed in characters. Held between roughly 55 and 75 characters in these documents.

Messaging

What a sentence has to establish on its own, without relying on a disposition the reader already holds toward the name.

Microcosm

A small thing that has the shape of a larger one. Used here as the working assumption that a single badly ordered paragraph usually has the shape of the strategy it belongs to.

Placement

The context in which paid distribution delivers an arrival. Most variance attributed to creative is variance in how well the placement selects for a moment when the reader's question is live.

Positional fault

A defect in which nothing is wrong with a unit except where it sits. The commonest finding of a unit-scale reading, and usually the cheapest to repair.

Unit

The smallest piece of material that still carries meaning on its own: a sentence, a link, a step or an ask. A word is normally too small and a page normally too large.

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