The rules

Writing — Document-Level Conventions

Fixes the document side of PAIN-POINTS §6 Writing: punctuation conventions, register, and the coherence/cohesion that ESL research repeatedly names the weakest part of English academic writing. Where style governs the sentence (word order, phrasing, the adverb slot), this spec governs everything above the sentence — the marks that join clauses, the shape of a paragraph, and the ties that bind sentences into a coherent whole.

These are document-level guidelines. Like style, they are guidance rather than single-word grammar — but they are what turns a run of regular sentences into a readable text. Sentence-internal phrasing stays in style; word forms stay in morphology and grammar.

Rule W1 — One regular punctuation set

Rule. World English uses a small, fixed set of punctuation marks, and each mark has one job (or, for the comma, one closed list of jobs). This rule is the single source of truth for punctuation: every other rule that touches a mark (G6’s ! and tag questions, G10’s apostrophe, G15’s comma-before-a-subordinate-clause) is a use of this inventory, never an exception to it.

• period . — end a statement or a command.

• comma , — mark one of a closed set of boundaries, never anything else:

  1. leading clause or adjunct — after a fronted subordinate clause, a fronted time/place adjunct, or a sentence-initial connective: If it rain, we stay (same comma G15 fixes); Next time, plan better; Also, check the file. / For example, this happens.
  2. coordinator joining independent clauses — before and, but, so joining two independent clauses, including two coordinated imperative clauses (an imperative is an independent clause for this purpose): Wash it, and dry it.
  3. list items — between every item of a list, including the last (the serial comma is always present). This job covers a list of clauses exactly as it covers a list of words: three or more independent clauses in a series take a comma between each, with the usual coordinator before the last — The roads beed icy, many drivers haved no experience, and visibility beed poor. (Two bare clauses with no coordinator are never joined by a comma alone — that is job 2’s territory, and job 2 always requires the coordinator.)
  4. vocative, politeness marker, or greeting — setting off a directly-addressed name, a politeness word (S8’s please/sorry), or a greeting’s name: Close the door, please.; Sorry, I can not come.; Hello Sara, …
  5. trailing tag question — before the invariant tag: It be good, right? (See the question-mark entry below: the tag is exempt from the leading/trailing ? bracket.)
  6. trailing duration afterthought — before a restated time-span tacked onto a finished clause: She still live here, for ten years.
  7. , then — before then marking a sequence between two clauses: Wash it, then dry it.

  No other comma use exists — in particular, there is no restrictive/non-restrictive comma distinction (G11 drops it entirely; a relative clause never takes a comma under any of the seven jobs above).

• apostrophe ' — one job only: mark a possessive (noun possessive 's/s' per G10; the pronoun possessive-determiner in G4 takes none). World English has no contractions, so the apostrophe never marks an omitted letter.

• question mark ? — G6 brackets a wh- or yes/no question with a ? at both ends: a leading ? opens it (and the next word is capitalized) and the usual ? closes it — ?You like it? The invariant tag question is the one exemption: right? is not itself bracketed — it takes only the ordinary trailing ? on the host clause (It be good, right?), because the tag is a fixed two-word add-on, not a separate question needing its own opening mark.

• exclamation mark ! — end an imperative given with force, per G6’s negative imperative (Not go!) and imperatives generally (Go!). A plain, unforced command still just takes a period (Close the door.).

• quotation marks — mark speech.

• colon : — one job only: introduce a list.

Abolished: the semicolon (;) entirely, and the colon in every use except before a list. Neither removes anything you can say — a semicolon becomes a period or an explicit connective (W5); a non-list colon becomes a period or a connective. Notational colons are not punctuation and are untouched: clock times (10:30) and ratios (2:1) keep their colon.

Problem it solves. English punctuation is heavily optional and idiomatic — comma placement is unwritten, and the semicolon and colon draw boundaries against the period and each other that even native writers dispute (PAIN-POINTS §6 names punctuation conventions explicitly). The semicolon’s rule (an independent clause on both sides) and the colon’s four overlapping uses (list, explanation, reveal, clause-join) are exactly the by-feel choices this project removes elsewhere. One mark, one closed list of jobs removes the choice.

Examples.

The first row drops a semicolon to a period; the second turns the hard ;however, into a plain , but (W5); the third turns an explanatory colon into an explicit because; the fourth keeps the colon because a list follows (serial comma present); the fifth shows a notational colon surviving untouched.

Trade-off. Slightly longer, slightly less ornate prose, and one genuine standard use of the semicolon — separating list items that themselves contain commas — must be reworded away (Rome, Italy; Lyon, France → Rome in Italy, Lyon in France). In return, no punctuation mark requires a native-intuition judgment.

Rule W2 — One plain register

Rule. World English has a single, neutral register: direct and plain. There is no formal/informal split, no elevated or slang variant. You write the same way to a professor and to a friend.

Problem it solves. English forces constant register calibration — I regret to inform you vs I’m sorry to say vs bad news — a native-intuition skill and a documented ESL difficulty (PAIN-POINTS §6, “register and tone”). Removing the axis removes the calibration. The related question of politeness and indirectness — how to soften a request or refusal — is a pragmatics concern handled by style.md S8–S9 (fixed markers and plain speech-act templates), not here.

Examples.

Trade-off. Loses tonal shading and the signaling of formality; gains one register that no one has to calibrate and no reader has to decode.

Rule W3 — State the main point first (thesis-first, linear shape)

Rule. Put the main point first, then support it. A paragraph — and, above it, a whole text — follows one fixed, linear shape: the claim or conclusion leads, and reasons, details, and examples follow it.

Problem it solves. Kaplan’s contrastive rhetoric (1966) showed paragraph order is culture-specific and that L1 rhetorical patterns transfer into and interfere with L2 writing (PAIN-POINTS §6). Some traditions build to the point; some circle it. Fixing one order — point first — means a reader from any background meets the same shape every time.

Examples. An indirect, point-last sentence, reorganized point-first:

Standard English (point last). Because the roads were icy, many drivers had no experience, and visibility was poor, the race was canceled.

World English (point first). The race beed canceled. The roads beed icy, many drivers haved no experience, and the visibility beed poor.

Trade-off. Loses the build-up and suspense some rhetorical traditions value; gains a shape the reader can rely on before reading a word of the content.

Rule W4 — One idea per paragraph, topic sentence first

Rule. Each paragraph covers one idea, and its first sentence states that idea (the topic sentence). Every other sentence in the paragraph supports only that idea; a new idea starts a new paragraph.

Problem it solves. Explicit topic sentences and one-idea paragraphs are the English academic norm that learners most often miss, and their absence is a leading cause of the coherence problems PAIN-POINTS §6 documents. Making the rule explicit removes the guesswork.

Examples.

World English. World English be easy to read. The spelling be regular, the verbs be regular, and the word order never change. A learner can predict every form.

The first sentence states the idea (easy to read); the rest support only that idea. A new claim — say, about pronunciation — would begin a new paragraph.

Trade-off. Less flexible than paragraphs that unfold an idea gradually; far easier to follow and to skim.

Rule W5 — Make every connection explicit

Rule. Bind sentences with an explicit connective from a small closed set — never leave the logical link implicit, and never carry it with punctuation. One connective per relation:

Problem it solves. Cohesion — the conjunction ties of Halliday & Hasan (1976) — is named the weakest aspect of ESL academic writing (PAIN-POINTS §6). English also offers stacks of near-synonyms whose differences are register nuance, not meaning (however / nevertheless / yet; therefore / thus / hence / consequently). World English keeps one per relation and routes the variants to it, the same way S6 routes collocations to a regular pairing.

Examples.

And an implicit link made explicit — the same case as W1’s abolished explanatory colon:

He was late. The train broke down. → He beed late because the train failed.

Boundary with G15. G15 fixes the subordinators that open a dependent clause (if, because, when, while…); W5 governs the connectives that link whole sentences and collects the register-variant synonyms. Together they give one word per logical relation.

Trade-off. Loses the fine shading between however and nevertheless; gains a link the reader never has to infer and a much shorter list of connectives to learn.

Rule W6 — Repeat, don’t vary; keep every reference clear

Rule. To refer again to a thing, repeat its noun, or use a pronoun whose antecedent is unmistakable. Do not use “elegant variation” — swapping in synonyms (the car, the vehicle, the automobile) only to avoid repeating a word. Every pronoun’s antecedent is the nearest matching noun.

Problem it solves. English style prizes synonym variation, but for a learner each synonym is another word to know, and a pronoun with an ambiguous antecedent is a top source of misreading — both are the reference and lexical cohesion ties of Halliday & Hasan that PAIN-POINTS §6 flags. Pronoun forms themselves are fixed by G4.

Examples.

The first row repeats the scientist instead of cycling through synonyms; the second replaces an ambiguous she with the noun it means.

Trade-off. Reads more repetitive and less literary; every reference is unambiguous and rests on a smaller vocabulary.

Summary