skills/ai-film-pipeline-master/references/phase-01-story-generation/genres-nonfiction.md

# Genres — non-fiction

Entry point into the database. Each kit ranks a short list of techniques by `id`; open the `cat-*.md` file named for that id's prefix (or `arcs.md`, `structures.md`, `situations.md`) for the full card.

A genre kit carries something a format kit does not: **required beats.** Genre in writing is a set of obligations, not a marketing label. The reader who opens a memoir or a piece of reportage has bought a contract, and the beats below are its clauses. Miss one and the reader registers a void they cannot name. Hit all of them and nothing else, and you have written formula: the cure is Truby's — carry two or three other genres in supporting roles, and let one of them argue against the primary.

**What makes this file different: the truth contract.** Fiction owes the reader coherence. Non-fiction owes coherence *and* correspondence — the claim that these events occurred, that this person said this, that this number is this number. That second obligation is not an ethics appendix bolted onto the craft; it *is* the craft, because every technique below either protects the contract or spends it. Compression, the composite character, the reconstructed scene, the moved quote, the tidied chronology — these are craft tools with a price in credibility, and a writer who does not price them will eventually publish something that collapses. So in every kit here, the **Rules** and **Avoid** blocks treat verification, consent, the duty to include material that cuts against you, and the limits of compression as structural constraints. They are where the genre's real difficulty lives.

Two related points. First, the contract is not uniform: memoir promises the truth as one fallible person recovered it, reportage promises the truth as multiple independent sources confirmed it, and conflating those two is how most non-fiction scandals start. Each kit states its own version. Second, the reader must be told which contract they are under — by the form, the subtitle, or a note — and telling them is itself a craft decision, made once, on the first page.

Note on overlap: **Investigation and Journalism** in `genres-inquiry.md` is the *fiction* genre about people who investigate — a plot shape for a drama with reporters in it. **Reportage** below is the non-fiction piece itself. They share vocabulary and nothing else structurally. Read both if you are writing either.

---

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## Contents

- [Memoir](#memoir)
- [Biography](#biography)
- [Personal Essay](#personal-essay)
- [Reportage](#reportage)
- [Advocacy](#advocacy)
- [Instructional and How-To](#instructional-and-how-to)
- [Nature and Science](#nature-and-science)
- [Coverage](#coverage)
- [Sources](#sources)

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## Memoir

**What the genre argues:** Memoir argues that a life contains a pattern the person living it could not see, and that finding the pattern is worth the cost of exposure. It is not autobiography — it does not cover a life, it covers a question. Truby's framing is the useful one: the memoirist is a detective of himself, and the system he grew up inside is the case. Its truth contract is the narrowest and the most honest one available: this is what happened as far as I can recover it, told by someone who was there and therefore compromised.

**Required beats:**
1. The retrospective narrator establishes the distance — how long ago this was, and who is doing the telling now.
2. The story world introduced as a system with rules the younger self had no power to refuse.
3. The frame declared: the span of years this book covers, and why it ends where it ends.
4. An ordinary day inside that system, rendered in full sensory detail, before anything goes wrong.
5. The ghost — the earliest event the narrator still organises his life around.
6. The narrator's own weakness named honestly: the shame, not just the wound.
7. The double desire stated — what the younger self wanted, and what the writing self is after in telling it.
8. The family opponent introduced doing something ordinary and likeable.
9. The first defiance, small, and its punishment.
10. The ally who saw it: the teacher, the aunt, the neighbour, the book.
11. Departure — leaving the system physically.
12. The discovery that the rules travelled in the luggage.
13. The adult repetition: the narrator does to someone else what was done to him.
14. Return to the place or the person, and it is smaller than remembered.
15. The confrontation, which is almost always a conversation that does not go as planned.
16. The record checked against memory — the photograph, the letter, the sibling's contradicting account — and the contradiction is printed, not resolved.
17. Double self-revelation: what the younger self learned then, and what the writer now knows the younger self did not.
18. The moral decision — forgiveness, farewell, or the refusal of both, stated plainly and without hedging.
19. New equilibrium: one concrete thing the narrator does differently now.

**Supporting genres:** Coming of Age supplies the younger self's arc and is memoir's most common partner (Truby treats them as one shape). Family Drama supplies the opponent and the ensemble. Social Drama or Migration supplies the system in beat 2 and is what raises a memoir above the personal — without it beat 19 has nothing to connect to.

**On writing about living people.** This is memoir's hardest craft problem and it is a craft problem, not a legal footnote, because every solution to it changes the book. Four things are worth holding. **One: your memory is evidence, not proof.** Check what is checkable — dates, addresses, what the weather did, what the letter actually said — and where memory and record disagree, print both. That admission is the most persuasive move available to you, and hiding it is the least. **Two: relevance is the test for inclusion.** Another person's private material belongs in your book only where your story genuinely does not work without it. A detail that is merely juicy has no defence, and readers can smell the difference. **Three: the composite character is a lie unless it is disclosed.** Merging three aunts into one aunt, compressing four conversations into one dinner, moving a remark from a car to a kitchen — these are all legitimate, and all of them oblige you to tell the reader, in a note, what class of alteration you have made. Undisclosed composites are what get memoirs pulped. **Four: consent is not the same as permission.** Showing the relevant pages to the people in them changes the book, usually for the better, and sometimes costs you a chapter; the writers who do it rarely regret it. Note also the hard asymmetry: only the living can sue, which means the people you owe the most care to are exactly the ones still in the room.

**Rules:** Declare the frame and the distance on the first page | Check every checkable fact and print the contradictions rather than smoothing them | Disclose compression and composites in a note, always | Name your own shame before you name anyone else's | Give the family opponent their best self before their worst | Include the scene that makes you look bad, and place it late | Ask what your story stops working without, and cut the rest of other people's privacy | Show the pages to the living where you can | End on an action, not on a conclusion about yourself

**Avoid:** The settling of scores, which readers detect in about four pages and never forgive — a memoir where the narrator is the only reasonable person in it has accidentally become evidence against him. Undisclosed composites and silently relocated scenes, which convert a true book into a discredited one the moment a sibling reads it. Sentimentality about the younger self, where the writing self protects the child from judgement and so removes the only thing the book was going to discover. The therapeutic draft submitted as a finished one: processing is a stage, not a genre, and the reader is not your listener. And the omitted contradiction — the letter that says something different, left out because it complicates the pattern, which is the exact point at which memoir stops being non-fiction.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **The Retrospective Narrator** (Voice) `voice.retrospective_narrator`
   Beat 1 and the whole book's authority. Memoir is two people talking; this card is how.
2. **Frame Narrative** (Time) `time.frame_narrative`
   Beat 3. The frame is what makes it a memoir rather than an autobiography, and it must be chosen, not drifted into.
3. **The Ghost** (Arc) `arc.the_ghost`
   Beat 5. The one event everything else is arranged around. Identify it before you draft.
4. **Shame and Humiliation** (Emotion) `emo.shame`
   Beat 6. Truby's weakness-need for this genre. The wound is the easy part; the shame is the book.
5. **The Beloved Antagonist** (Antagonist) `anta.beloved`
   Beat 8. The opponent is someone you love, and the card is about keeping both halves true at once.
6. **Real People and the Composite** (Character) `char.real_person_composite`
   The truth-contract card. What you may merge, what you must disclose, and what you may never do.
7. **Unreliable Memory** (Time) `time.unreliable_memory`
   Beat 16. Memory's fallibility written as technique rather than confessed as a weakness.
8. **The Self-Correcting Narrator** (Voice) `voice.self_correcting_narrator`
   The most credible voice available to this genre: a narrator who revises himself on the page.
9. **The Retrospective Narrator** (POV) `pov.retrospective_distance`
   The POV-side companion to rank 1 — how far the telling sits from the told, and when to move it.
10. **The Specific Detail** (Emotion) `emo.specific_detail`
    Beat 4. Sensory particularity is what earns you the reader's belief in everything unverifiable.
11. **Cold Memory** (Time) `time.cold_memory`
    For the beats you cannot afford to warm up — the recollection reported flat, which hits hardest.
12. **The Secret** (Character) `char.the_secret`
    Beats 5, 15 and 16. Every memoir has one and the structure is built on when it surfaces.
13. **Theme in Non-Fiction** (Theme) `theme.theme_in_nonfiction`
    How a true story argues something without the writer stepping forward to argue it.
14. **The Cost Paid** (Endings) `end.cost_paid`
    Beats 18 and 19. Name what the recovery actually cost and who else paid part of it.
15. **The Narrator Who Believes Himself** (Subtext) `sub.narrator_self_deception`
    The most advanced card here: letting the reader see past the narrator, on purpose, in your own memoir.
16. **Sentimentality** (Emotion) `emo.sentimentality`
    The failure diagnostic, aimed specifically at every scene involving your younger self.

---

## Biography

**What the genre argues:** Biography argues that a documented life can be understood — that the letters, the records and the testimony add up to a person rather than to a file. Its central tension is between evidence and narrative: the reader wants a character, and the sources supply fragments. Its truth contract is the strictest here and the most mechanical: every scene rests on a source, the source is named, and where sources conflict the conflict is shown rather than arbitrated silently.

**Required beats:**
1. A frame scene — one documented moment that contains the subject's central contradiction — placed first.
2. The claim: what this book argues the life means, stated in the opening pages so the reader can hold you to it.
3. Provenance declared — which archives, which letters, which interviews, and crucially what is missing.
4. Inheritance and place: the family, the trade, the town, with the economics made concrete.
5. The formative event, dated and sourced.
6. The first work described in enough technical detail that the reader can judge it themselves.
7. The break — the patron, accident, war or marriage that changed the scale of the life.
8. Contemporaries introduced as rivals and as measures of the subject's actual standing.
9. The public version of the subject forms: the name as other people used it.
10. The private contradiction, documented rather than inferred.
11. The peak, described through the evidence of its effect on other people.
12. The disputed episode, where the sources disagree and the disagreement is printed in full.
13. The biographer's own judgement stated once, and explicitly marked as judgement.
14. Decline — of power, faculty, audience or health — at the rate it actually happened, not at a dramatic one.
15. Money in the last years, specifically.
16. Death, using the medical record, with no scene the record does not support.
17. The afterlife of the reputation, and the named people who managed it.
18. Final assessment: what this life is evidence for, answering the claim from beat 2.

**Supporting genres:** Detective supplies the archival method and is the reason good biographies are readable — the search is a plot. Social Drama or Historical supplies the world, and stops the book becoming a great-man story. Tragedy supplies the shape of beats 14 to 16 when the life has that shape, and must not be imposed when it does not.

**Rules:** State the claim early and let the reader audit it against your evidence | Name the source for every scene, in the text or in the note, with no exceptions | Declare what the archive does not contain — the silence is part of the finding | Print source conflicts rather than choosing quietly between them | Mark inference as inference, every time, in the sentence itself | Never write interiority you cannot source; write the letter instead | Keep your own judgement to one clearly labelled place per episode | Give the subject's enemies their documented case | Describe the work in enough detail for the reader to disagree with you about it

**Avoid:** Invented interiority, which is biography's defining sin: "she must have felt" and "he surely wondered" are fiction wearing the book's authority, and one page of it contaminates the other four hundred. The hagiography-or-hatchet binary, where the biographer picks a verdict in chapter one and spends the rest assembling a prosecution or a defence. Suppressing the disputed episode because it spoils the arc, which is the exact place a serious reader checks you. Telling the reader what to think about the subject instead of showing the evidence and letting them arrive — replace "she was determined despite great adversity" with the adversity in specifics and the determination emerges by itself. And the proper-noun avalanche of the research showing through, where everyone the subject ever met is named because the note cards exist.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **The Controlling Idea** (Theme) `theme.controlling_idea`
   Beat 2. A biography without a claim is a chronology, and a chronology is not a book.
2. **Authority by Specificity** (Voice) `voice.authority_by_specificity`
   The genre's entire voice strategy: earn belief with the price of the rent, not with adjectives.
3. **The Load-Bearing Contradiction** (Character) `char.load_bearing_contradiction`
   Beats 1 and 10. Find the one contradiction the whole life runs on and build the frame scene around it.
4. **Diegetic Text** (Exposition) `expo.diegetic_text`
   The letter, the ledger, the diary entry quoted as the object itself. Biography's primary evidence on the page.
5. **The Same Event Twice** (POV) `pov.same_event_twice`
   Beat 12. Two sources, two accounts, both printed. This is how you handle disputes with your credit intact.
6. **The Knowledge Ledger** (Information) `info.knowledge_ledger`
   Three columns: what is documented, what is inferred, what is guessed. Keep them separate on the page.
7. **Distant Third Person** (POV) `pov.distant_third`
   The genre's default distance, and the card explains exactly how close you may move before you are inventing.
8. **Reputation Before Entrance** (Character) `char.reputation_before_entrance`
   Beat 9. The subject as contemporaries described him, delivered before your own portrait.
9. **Linear Spine** (Time) `time.linear_spine`
   Biography can be thematic, but it needs a chronological spine under the theme or the reader falls through.
10. **Double Anchor** (Time) `time.double_anchor`
    Beat 1 against beats 16 to 18 — the frame scene and the assessment holding the book's two ends.
11. **Heritage Specificity** (Exposition) `expo.heritage_specificity`
    Beat 4. Period, place and trade rendered exactly, which is also the fastest way to establish competence.
12. **Real People and the Composite** (Character) `char.real_person_composite`
    Read the card for what biography may *not* do that memoir sometimes may. The line is different here.
13. **Descriptive, Not Prescriptive** (Theme) `theme.descriptive_not_prescriptive`
    The card that keeps beat 18 from becoming a verdict handed down.
14. **The Proper Noun Budget** (Exposition) `expo.proper_noun_budget`
    The research-showing-through failure, controlled by a hard count per chapter.
15. **The Prologue of History** (Exposition) `expo.history_prologue`
    Beat 4's usual failure mode: forty pages of context before the subject is born. Read the fix.
16. **The Value Landed** (Endings) `end.value_landed`
    Beat 18. What actually changed, in the world, because this person was in it — stated in one value, not a summary.

---

## Personal Essay

**What the genre argues:** The personal essay argues that thinking is worth watching. It is not a small memoir: memoir is retrospective and closes on a truth the writer has arrived at, while the essay is a live attempt — it circles a single idea, tests it against the writer's own life and against material from outside it, and ends somewhere broader and less settled than where it began. Its truth contract is modest and strict at once: nothing invented, the writer's own uncertainty on display, and no claim to represent anyone but the person writing.

**Required beats:** The essay's shape is a movement rather than a plot, but the movement is real and it is roughly this. Treat the order as strong guidance rather than a sequence you may not vary.

1. The occasion — a small, dateable, external thing that made this essay necessary now.
2. A first sentence that commits to a voice and a stance rather than to a thesis.
3. The concrete scene, kept short, that the essay will keep returning to.
4. The question asked plainly, in the essayist's own uncertainty, not rhetorically.
5. A first attempted answer, offered honestly and found insufficient.
6. The turn outward: a fact, a history, a text, a stranger's life brought in from beyond the self.
7. The second subject introduced — the essay's other material, apparently unrelated to the first.
8. The braid: the two subjects set side by side with the connection unannounced.
9. A counter-instance the writer cannot explain away, and does not try to.
10. The self implicated — the writer's own complicity in the thing being examined.
11. A digression that earns its place by turning out to be the essay's real subject.
12. The scene from beat 3 returned to and read differently.
13. The admission: what the writer got wrong, or still does not know.
14. A refusal of the consolation the material is offering.
15. The widening — the personal case connected to the general one, briefly, without claiming to speak for anyone.
16. A last paragraph that closes the image rather than the argument.

**Supporting genres:** Memoir supplies beat 3 and beat 10, and the essay collapses into commentary without them. Advocacy supplies the pressure in beat 15 — an essay that never risks a claim is a mood piece. Nature and Science, or any research-carrying genre, supplies the outward material in beats 6 and 7, which is what separates the essay from a diary entry.

**Rules:** Start from a question you cannot already answer | Anchor the whole essay to one concrete, dateable occasion | Bring in material from outside your own life by the first third | Let the two subjects sit together without explaining the link | Include the counter-instance and leave it standing | Implicate yourself before you implicate anyone else | Invent nothing, including the tidy version of a conversation — quote it short or paraphrase it and say so | Speak only for yourself, explicitly, when you widen | Read it aloud; the essay is a voice or it is nothing

**Avoid:** The essay that reaches its conclusion in paragraph two and then walks there — the reader can feel the destination and stops watching the thinking, which was the only product. The explained theme, arriving in the final paragraph to tell you what you just read. Confessional material with no outward turn, which is a journal with a byline. The move from "I" to "we" made silently, so a personal observation acquires an unearned constituency — if you want to speak for a group, say so and defend it. And the invented detail smuggled in for shape: the essay's licence to associate freely is not a licence to improve the facts, and one fabricated dinner conversation retroactively voids everything else you asserted.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **Start From a Question** (Theme) `theme.start_from_a_question`
   Beat 4 and the gate for the whole form. If you know the answer, write an argument instead.
2. **The Confiding Voice** (Voice) `voice.confiding_voice`
   The essay's native register. The card's warnings about false intimacy matter more here than anywhere.
3. **The Narrating Persona** (Voice) `voice.narrating_persona`
   The "I" of an essay is a construction, and knowing that is the difference between an essayist and a diarist.
4. **The Second Subject** (Subtext) `sub.second_subject`
   Beats 7 and 8. The braid is the essay's single most reliable structure and this is the card for it.
5. **Recurring Fragment** (Time) `time.recurring_fragment`
   Beats 3 and 12. The returned-to image, carrying different weight each time it appears.
6. **The Self-Correcting Narrator** (Voice) `voice.self_correcting_narrator`
   Beats 5, 9 and 13. Visible revision of your own position is the form's chief pleasure.
7. **Multiple Competing Themes** (Theme) `theme.competing_themes`
   A defect in a screenplay and a virtue here. Read the conditions that make it work.
8. **The Hedge** (Voice) `voice.the_hedge`
   Calibrated uncertainty. Too little and you are bluffing; too much and you have said nothing.
9. **The Specific Detail** (Emotion) `emo.specific_detail`
   Beat 3. One exact detail buys you three paragraphs of abstraction; none buys you nothing.
10. **The Understating Voice** (Voice) `voice.understating_voice`
    Beat 14. The refusal of consolation is delivered flat or it becomes the consolation.
11. **The One-Line Paragraph** (Rhythm) `rhythm.one_line_paragraph`
    The essay's punctuation at the structural level. Use it three times in a piece, not twenty.
12. **Reading Aloud** (Rhythm) `rhythm.read_aloud_test`
    The only test that catches the essay's real fault, which is a voice that stops sounding like anyone.
13. **Nostalgia Without Sentimentality** (Emotion) `emo.nostalgia`
    The form's most common emotional trap, with the card's method for using the feeling without being used by it.
14. **The Open Ending** (Endings) `end.open_ending`
    Beat 16. Open, not unfinished. The card draws the line the genre is most often accused of crossing.
15. **The Last Line** (Endings) `end.last_line`
    An essay is remembered by its last sentence more than any other form here. Write it last and write it ten times.
16. **The Explained Theme** (Theme) `theme.explained_theme`
    The failure diagnostic. Delete your final paragraph and check whether the essay lost anything.

---

## Reportage

**What the genre argues:** Reportage argues that a thing can be established — that with enough legwork, enough documents and enough independent confirmation, a reader can be told what happened with a stated degree of confidence. Its distinctive move is that it goes and looks. Its truth contract is the heaviest in this file and it is explicitly plural: not "I remember" but "two people who were present, plus the filing, independently say." Every narrative technique borrowed from fiction — scene, character, dialogue, withheld information — is borrowed on the condition that it is sourced.

For the *fictional* genre about journalists, see Investigation and Journalism in `genres-inquiry.md`. That is a plot shape. This is a set of obligations for writing true things.

**Required beats:**
1. The assignment or the itch — why this, and why now — stated to an editor or honestly to yourself.
2. The reporting plan: the list of people who must be talked to for the piece to be true, written before you go.
3. Arrival — the first scene witnessed in person, recorded in notes as description rather than judgement.
4. The central character found: the one person whose week the piece can follow.
5. Terms set with that person, explicitly — what on the record means, what the piece is, what they will not get to approve.
6. The documentary layer gathered: records, filings, data, the physical paper.
7. Second and third sources who can independently confirm the central scene.
8. The institution's official account obtained, in its own words, at length.
9. The contradicting material found — and the decision, made consciously, to keep it.
10. The right of reply, put specifically, in writing, with a real deadline, to every person criticised.
11. The scene you cannot use, and the reason written down.
12. The structure chosen: whose chronology the piece will follow, and what that choice costs.
13. The opening scene selected from what was witnessed, never from what was reconstructed.
14. The nut graf — what the piece is about and why it matters — placed after the reader is already inside it.
15. The evidentiary spine written through: every claim attributed at the point it appears, not in a clump.
16. The fact-check pass, run against the notes and the recordings, never against memory.
17. The harm read: who is identifiable, who is a private person rather than a public one, what is withheld and why.
18. Publication, with the correction policy somewhere the reader can actually find it.

**Supporting genres:** Detective supplies the method — the clue discipline in `genres-inquiry.md` is directly transferable and is what keeps the middle from becoming a list of phone calls. Social Drama supplies the people, who must be rendered as lives rather than as evidence. Nature and Science supplies the explanatory machinery whenever the story has a technical core, which is most of the time now.

**Rules:** Write the source list before the reporting, then report against it | Verify before you publish and prefer original sources — the people present, the filing itself, the recording | Attribute inside the sentence, not in a footnote the reader will not reach | Grant anonymity only where there is real risk and the information exists nowhere else, and tell the reader why you granted it | Put the right of reply in writing, specifically, and print the refusal if you get one | Keep the material that cuts against your story — the piece is stronger with it and dead without it | Never build a composite person or a reconstructed scene without saying so in the text | Label every reconstruction, every re-enactment, every merged timeline | Correct in public, quickly, in the same place the error ran

**Avoid:** The undisclosed composite and the silently compressed timeline, which are the two techniques that have destroyed more reputations in this genre than outright fabrication, precisely because the writers thought they were making stylistic choices. Scene-setting beyond the evidence — the weather nobody recorded, the expression nobody described, the thought nobody reported — which reads as vividness and functions as invention. Dropping the inconvenient source because the piece is cleaner without him; that is the moment the work stops being reportage, and the reader who knows the subject will notice. The anonymous source used for convenience rather than for safety, which spends the reader's trust on something you could have got on the record with one more call. And the villain personified: an institution rendered as one bad individual lets the system off exactly where the reporting was supposed to indict it.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **The Reporter's Stance** (POV) `pov.reportage_stance`
   The genre's native distance and its ethics in one card. Read before choosing how close to sit.
2. **The Situation Hook** (Openings) `open.situation_hook`
   Beat 13. The opening scene is witnessed, concrete and in motion, and this card is how it is built.
3. **Procedural Exposition** (Exposition) `expo.procedural_exposition`
   Beats 6 and 7. The work is the story. This card keeps it from becoming a montage of process.
4. **Authority by Specificity** (Voice) `voice.authority_by_specificity`
   The exact number, the exact time, the exact street. This is how reportage earns belief on the unverifiable parts.
5. **Diegetic Text** (Exposition) `expo.diegetic_text`
   Beat 6. The memo, the filing, the redacted page reproduced as itself rather than summarised.
6. **The Knowledge Ledger** (Information) `info.knowledge_ledger`
   Known, provable and publishable are three different columns. Keep all three and check them before beat 16.
7. **Real People and the Composite** (Character) `char.real_person_composite`
   The truth-contract card for this genre. The line between compression and fabrication is drawn here.
8. **The Institutional Antagonist** (Antagonist) `anta.institutional`
   Beat 8. How to keep a faceless institution dramatic without inventing a villain to stand in for it.
9. **Let Someone Else Feel It** (Emotion) `emo.someone_else_feels_it`
   The reporter stays flat; the emotion is routed through the person across the table. Beat 4's technique.
10. **Strategic Withholding** (Dialogue) `dial.strategic_withholding`
    Beats 5 and 10. A source interview is a negotiation conducted almost entirely in what is not said.
11. **The Jargon Threshold** (Exposition) `expo.jargon_threshold`
    How much of the subject's own vocabulary to carry. Too little is condescension, too much is a press release.
12. **Concrete Nouns Over Abstract** (Rhythm) `rhythm.concrete_nouns`
    The prose-level defence against the abstraction that creeps in wherever the reporting was thin.
13. **Objective Camera-Eye** (POV) `pov.objective_camera`
    Beat 3. Record what a camera would have recorded; do your interpreting later and separately.
14. **The Pressure That Is Not Aimed** (Antagonist) `anta.ambient_pressure`
    Nobody threatens anybody. The pressure is commercial, legal and structural, and it is more interesting.
15. **Descriptive, Not Prescriptive** (Theme) `theme.descriptive_not_prescriptive`
    What keeps beat 14 a nut graf rather than an editorial.
16. **The Rigged Argument** (Theme) `theme.rigged_argument`
    The failure diagnostic. Run it over the section where you found yourself writing quickly.

---

## Advocacy

**What the genre argues:** Advocacy argues that something should change, and that this reader should do something about it. It is the only genre in this file whose success is measured outside the text. Its truth contract is counter-intuitive: because it is openly partisan, it is held to a *higher* evidentiary standard than a neutral piece would be, and its single most persuasive technique is the deliberate inclusion of material that damages its own case. The reader who catches you hiding one thing discards everything.

**Required beats:**
1. The concrete harm, shown happening to one named person in one identifiable place.
2. The claim stated in a single sentence that a reasonable person could disagree with.
3. Standing declared: who is writing, what their interest is, and who pays them.
4. The scale — the number that turns one case into a pattern, with its source attached.
5. The mechanism explained: how the harm is produced, not merely that it occurs.
6. The current rule, policy or practice quoted exactly, not characterised.
7. The strongest version of the opposing case, stated so its own holders would recognise and accept it.
8. The concession — what the opposition is right about, granted plainly and without a "but" in the same sentence.
9. The reason the concession does not settle the matter.
10. Evidence that cuts against the writer's position, included and weighed on the page.
11. The counter-example the writer's own side usually leaves out.
12. The proposal, specific enough to be costed: who does what, by when, paid for how.
13. The feasibility objection answered with a case where it was actually done.
14. The cost of the proposal stated honestly, including who bears it and who will resent it.
15. The cost of doing nothing, stated in the same units as beat 14.
16. The ask: one action, addressed to a reader who is in a position to take it.

**Supporting genres:** Reportage supplies beats 1, 4 and 6, and advocacy without reporting is opinion. Personal Essay supplies the standing in beat 3 and the voice — the best advocacy is written by someone visibly implicated. Social Drama supplies the named person in beat 1, who has to be a life rather than an exhibit or the whole piece reads as instrumental.

**Rules:** State the claim in one falsifiable sentence and put it early | Declare your interest and your funding before anyone asks | Steelman the opposition — write their case until they would sign it, then answer that version | Concede fully, in its own sentence, without immediate qualification | Include the evidence against you and weigh it visibly | Source every number, and use the same units on both sides of the ledger | Make the proposal specific enough to be costed and therefore criticised | Name who pays for your solution | End on one action a real reader can actually take

**Avoid:** The straw man, which is the genre's fatal and most tempting error — an opposition assembled out of its stupidest adherents persuades nobody who was not already convinced, and signals to everyone else that you could not beat the real argument. Emotional escalation substituted for the mechanism in beat 5: outrage tells the reader what to feel and not why anything happens. Numbers without sources, or with units that shift between your side's costs and theirs. The named person of beat 1 used as fuel and then dropped, which readers experience as a second harm done to them. And the ask that is not an ask — "we must do better", "awareness is the first step" — which converts a piece of advocacy into a mood and lets everyone, including the writer, off.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **The Controlling Idea** (Theme) `theme.controlling_idea`
   Beat 2. One sentence, falsifiable. Everything in the piece is subordinate to it or it is cut.
2. **Write the Opponent's Case** (Antagonist) `anta.write_the_case`
   Beat 7. The steelman, as a drafting exercise you actually perform before writing your own argument.
3. **The Opponent Is Right About Something** (Antagonist) `anta.right_about_something`
   Beat 8. The concession is not a courtesy, it is the most persuasive paragraph in the piece.
4. **The Concession That Wins** (Dialogue) `dial.concession_that_wins`
   The technique for beats 8 and 9 at sentence level: give ground fully, then take the argument elsewhere.
5. **The Specific Detail** (Emotion) `emo.specific_detail`
   Beat 1. One person, one place, one exact thing. The abstract harm persuades nobody.
6. **Earn the Situation First** (Emotion) `emo.earn_the_situation`
   The discipline that keeps beat 1 from being exploitative. Establish before you ask for feeling.
7. **Show the Rule's Price** (Exposition) `expo.rule_cost_demo`
   Beats 5 and 6. Demonstrate the policy's cost in operation rather than describing the policy.
8. **Concrete Nouns Over Abstract** (Rhythm) `rhythm.concrete_nouns`
   Advocacy prose defaults to abstraction faster than any other kind. This is the correction.
9. **Parallel Construction** (Rhythm) `rhythm.parallel_construction`
   Beats 14 and 15. Costs on both sides, in matched grammar, which makes the comparison unavoidable.
10. **The Triad** (Rhythm) `rhythm.triad`
    The rhetorical unit of persuasion. Use it where the argument is strongest, never where it is weakest.
11. **Anaphora** (Rhythm) `rhythm.anaphora`
    Reserve it for beat 16. Used in the middle it reads as a rally and loses the undecided reader.
12. **Answer the Question That Was Asked** (Endings) `end.answer_the_question_asked`
    Beat 16. Whatever beat 2 asked, the ending has to answer it and not a nearby easier one.
13. **Descriptive, Not Prescriptive** (Theme) `theme.descriptive_not_prescriptive`
    Counter-intuitive here, and the reason the best advocacy shows the world rather than issuing instructions.
14. **The Rigged Argument** (Theme) `theme.rigged_argument`
    The primary failure diagnostic. Apply it to beat 7 specifically and be honest about the result.
15. **Theme Applied Only to Others** (Theme) `theme.applied_only_to_others`
    The second diagnostic. Advocacy that never tests its own principle on its own side is tribal signalling.
16. **The Manipulated Beat** (Emotion) `emo.manipulated_beat`
    The third. Run it over beat 1, which is where the genre reaches for the reader's throat.

---

## Instructional and How-To

**What the genre argues:** Instructional writing argues that a competence is transferable — that what one person can do, a stranger can be brought to do by reading. It is the only genre here whose success is directly testable: the reader either ends up with the working thing or they do not. Its truth contract is behavioural rather than evidentiary. It promises that these steps, performed in this order, produce this result, and that the writer has actually performed them. An untested procedure published as tested is this genre's version of fabrication.

**Required beats:**
1. The outcome shown first — what the reader will have at the end, concretely, ideally as an image.
2. The reader's starting state named: what you are assuming they already know and can already do.
3. Prerequisites and materials, complete, before step one, with nothing appearing mid-procedure.
4. Time and cost stated honestly, including the parts that are only waiting.
5. The task split into the smallest unit that produces a visible result.
6. Step one produces something the reader can see working within minutes.
7. Each step written as one action, in the imperative, in the order it is performed.
8. The state after each step described, so the reader can confirm they are still on track.
9. The first likely error named at the point where it actually happens, not collected in an appendix.
10. Recovery from that error given as steps, not as advice.
11. The one place where judgement rather than instruction is required, flagged and explained.
12. Every safety or irreversibility warning placed before the action it concerns, never after.
13. A worked example run end to end, with real values rather than placeholders.
14. The variation: the same procedure with one parameter changed, to show which parts are load-bearing.
15. Verification — how the reader proves to themselves that it worked.
16. What to do next, and an explicit statement of what this procedure does not cover.

**Supporting genres:** Nature and Science supplies the conceptual layer for procedures whose "why" matters. Personal Essay, used very sparingly, supplies the voice — a single paragraph of the writer's own failure buys more trust than a page of reassurance. Reportage supplies the discipline of testing, which is this genre's equivalent of fact-checking.

**Rules:** Perform the procedure yourself, exactly as written, before publishing it | Show the finished result before the first step | State your assumed starting knowledge explicitly | Front-load every material and prerequisite | One action per step, in the imperative | Describe the state after each step so the reader can self-locate | Put warnings before the dangerous action, never in a box afterwards | Name errors where they occur and give the recovery as steps | Cut everything that does not help the reader act — minimalist documentation is not terseness, it is the removal of what the reader will skip anyway

**Avoid:** The curse of knowledge, which is the entire genre's failure in one phrase: the step you did not write is always the one that was automatic for you and impossible for them, and the only cure is watching a real beginner attempt it. Conceptual preamble before the first action — the reader came to do something, and minimalist instruction earns its concepts by hanging them on tasks already attempted. Warnings placed after the irreversible step, which is negligence formatted as documentation. The procedure that was never actually run in the state it describes, so step eleven silently assumes something step four did not produce. And the glossary as a substitute for teaching, where unexplained terms are deferred to a list the reader must leave the page to consult.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **The Explainer Scaffold** (Exposition) `expo.explainer_scaffold`
   The genre's macro-shape. Read it before outlining anything.
2. **Need-to-Know Ladder** (Exposition) `expo.need_to_know_ladder`
   Beat 2 and the sequencing of everything after it. Deliver each thing at the step it is needed, not before.
3. **Procedural Exposition** (Exposition) `expo.procedural_exposition`
   Beats 7 and 8. How a sequence of actions stays readable past step four.
4. **Rule by Demonstration** (Exposition) `expo.rule_by_demonstration`
   Beats 6 and 13. Show the rule operating and costing something rather than stating it.
5. **The Competent-Character Walkthrough** (Exposition) `expo.competent_walkthrough`
   Beat 13. The worked example, run by someone who knows what they are doing, with real values.
6. **Familiar Anchor, One Strange Word** (Exposition) `expo.familiar_anchor`
   Beat 2. New concepts arrive one at a time, each attached to something the reader already holds.
7. **The Jargon Threshold** (Exposition) `expo.jargon_threshold`
   How much of the field's vocabulary to teach and how much to route around. The card gives the test.
8. **Coined Term in Context** (Exposition) `expo.coined_term_in_context`
   Define in the sentence that first uses the term, in use. This is what replaces a glossary.
9. **Verb Strength and the Passive** (Rhythm) `rhythm.verb_load`
   Beat 7. Every step is an imperative verb, and the card explains what happens when it is not.
10. **Concrete Nouns Over Abstract** (Rhythm) `rhythm.concrete_nouns`
    "Tighten the bolt" beats "ensure adequate fastening", every time, in every field.
11. **Parallel Construction** (Rhythm) `rhythm.parallel_construction`
    Steps written in matched grammar so the reader can skim them and still act correctly.
12. **Short-Form Front-Loading** (Exposition) `expo.short_form_frontload`
    Beat 1. The outcome goes first, because a reader who cannot see the destination will not start.
13. **The Deletion Test** (Exposition) `expo.deletion_test`
    The minimalism discipline: cut the sentence and check whether the reader can still act.
14. **The Optional Appendix** (Exposition) `expo.optional_appendix`
    Where the "why" lives, so the main path stays actionable for the reader who does not want it.
15. **The Glossary Crutch** (Exposition) `expo.glossary_crutch`
    The failure diagnostic. A glossary is a record of the terms you failed to teach in place.
16. **The Lore Dump** (Exposition) `expo.lore_dump`
    The second diagnostic, aimed at your introduction, which is almost certainly three times too long.

---

## Nature and Science

**What the genre argues:** This genre argues that the world rewards attention, and that understanding a thing does not diminish it. Its two halves pull against each other productively: nature writing insists the subject has standing of its own, while science writing insists the claim must be provisional and sourced. Its truth contract has a clause no other genre here carries — **the obligation to represent uncertainty accurately.** Overstating confidence is this genre's fabrication, and it is the failure that has done the most public damage.

**Required beats:**
1. The reader placed somewhere physical — a field, a bench, a ship, a room — before any concept arrives.
2. The observation that does not fit, described as it was actually noticed rather than as it was later understood.
3. The question stated in a form that could be answered wrongly.
4. What was believed before, and who believed it, represented fairly rather than as superseded foolishness.
5. The person doing the work introduced with their hands in it.
6. The method made concrete: the instrument, the count, the number of years, the size of the sample.
7. The first result, with its actual magnitude and its actual uncertainty, both.
8. The explanatory model introduced through an analogy — which is then explicitly marked as an analogy.
9. Where the analogy breaks, stated by the writer before the reader can find it.
10. The competing explanation, given its best case and its named advocates.
11. The evidence that decides between them, or a plain admission that nothing yet does.
12. Scale translated into something the body understands, without exaggerating to do it.
13. The organism, place or system given its own presence — what it is, not only what it is for.
14. The human consequence, if there is one, kept strictly proportionate to the evidence.
15. What is still not known, stated specifically enough to be an actual research question.
16. Return to the place from beat 1, changed by what the reader now knows.

**Supporting genres:** Reportage supplies beats 5, 6 and 10 — the fieldwork and the fair representation of dissenters. Personal Essay supplies beats 1 and 16 and the permission to be present in the piece, which is what distinguishes nature writing from a survey. Advocacy is the most dangerous partner and sometimes the necessary one: when it takes over, beat 14 inflates and the genre loses the credibility that made it worth writing.

**Rules:** Put the reader in a physical place before the first concept | Represent the superseded belief fairly and name who held it | Give every number its uncertainty in the same sentence | Mark every analogy as an analogy and say where it fails | Give the competing explanation its strongest form and its real advocates | Prefer markers of possibility to expressions of personal belief — "the data are consistent with" rather than "I think" | Keep the consequence proportionate to the evidence, even when the proportionate version is less urgent | State what is not known specifically, as a question someone could go and answer | Let the subject exist independently of its usefulness to people

**Avoid:** Certainty inflation, which is this genre's characteristic fabrication: the hedge that survived peer review and died in the rewrite, converting "suggests" into "proves" because the sentence read better. The analogy left unmarked, which the reader then reasons from as though it were the mechanism, producing confident and wrong beliefs that are your fault. The hero-and-villain frame applied to research and to ecology alike, where one scientist is right against the establishment or one species is a menace — it is almost always a distortion and it is always the easiest story available. Wonder used as a substitute for explanation, where lyrical writing covers the place the writer did not understand the paper. And the consequence inflated to justify the piece's existence, which is the exact move that costs the whole genre its authority the next time it matters.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **Familiar Anchor, One Strange Word** (Exposition) `expo.familiar_anchor`
   Beat 8. The analogy discipline: anchor to the known, introduce one unknown, then mark the seam.
2. **The Scale Reveal Opening** (Openings) `open.scale_reveal`
   Beats 1 and 12. Scale is this genre's best opening instrument and its easiest exaggeration.
3. **Authority by Specificity** (Voice) `voice.authority_by_specificity`
   Beat 6. The instrument, the count, the years. Specificity is what makes a lay reader trust a technical claim.
4. **The Hedge** (Voice) `voice.the_hedge`
   The uncertainty obligation, at sentence level. This is the single most important card in the kit.
5. **Rule by Demonstration** (Exposition) `expo.rule_by_demonstration`
   Beats 2 and 7. The mechanism shown operating, with something at stake, rather than described.
6. **Coined Term in Context** (Exposition) `expo.coined_term_in_context`
   Technical terms defined in the sentence that uses them, so the reader never has to leave the page.
7. **The Jargon Threshold** (Exposition) `expo.jargon_threshold`
   How much of the field's own vocabulary the reader should end up owning. Under-teaching is condescension.
8. **Concrete Nouns Over Abstract** (Rhythm) `rhythm.concrete_nouns`
   Beat 13. The organism is a specific thing with a specific body, not a category.
9. **The Specific Detail** (Emotion) `emo.specific_detail`
   What makes beat 13 an encounter instead of a description.
10. **Non-Human Viewpoint** (POV) `pov.nonhuman_pov`
    Nature writing's most powerful and most abusable move. The card's constraints keep it honest.
11. **The Iceberg Principle** (Exposition) `expo.iceberg_principle`
    You will know twenty times what you use. The card is about making the unused twenty felt.
12. **The Proper Noun Budget** (Exposition) `expo.proper_noun_budget`
    Species names, institutions, researchers, papers. Set a count per section and hold it.
13. **The Optional Appendix** (Exposition) `expo.optional_appendix`
    Where the methodology and the caveats live in full, so the main text can move without lying.
14. **Theme in Non-Fiction** (Theme) `theme.theme_in_nonfiction`
    Beat 16. How the piece means something without the writer stepping out to say what.
15. **Descriptive, Not Prescriptive** (Theme) `theme.descriptive_not_prescriptive`
    The card that holds beat 14 to its proportions when advocacy starts pulling.
16. **Answer the Question That Was Asked** (Endings) `end.answer_the_question_asked`
    Beat 3 against beats 15 and 16. Answer the question you posed, including by saying it is still open.

---

## Coverage

Ten non-fiction kits: Memoir, Biography, Personal Essay, Reportage, Advocacy, Instructional and How-To, Nature and Science, the three interactive kits (now in `formats-doc.md`, because they are formats rather than genres), Interactive Testimony and Oral History, Museum and Installation Narrative.

Each kit's Rules and Avoid blocks carry that genre's specific truth contract, because the contracts differ: memoir promises one fallible witness, biography promises sourced evidence with its conflicts printed, reportage promises independent confirmation, advocacy promises the inclusion of what damages it, instructional writing promises a procedure the writer actually ran, and nature and science promise accurately represented uncertainty. Memoir's kit additionally treats writing about living people at length, as a craft problem.

**The three interactive kits state the fourth kind of contract, and it is the hardest one: true on every path.** A branch in fiction is an authored possibility; a branch in non-fiction is a route through material that was true before anyone arrived, and it has to stay true whichever way the user goes. Interactive Documentary promises that the user chooses the route and the depth and never the facts. Interactive Testimony and Oral History promises that nothing attributed to a contributor was assembled, paraphrased or generated, and that consent is granular and rolling because there is no cut to approve. Museum and Installation Narrative promises that a visitor who reads only the top layer has been correctly informed rather than half-informed. All three are written to the ethical constraints in `formats-doc.md` — ongoing consent, contradicting material on screen, signalled reconstruction — which do not soften under interactivity but get harder, because a branch is precisely a mechanism for not seeing things.

**A note on their shape.** These three follow the format-kit fields used in `formats-doc.md` — Constraints, Grammar, Palette, Rules, Examples, Avoid — rather than the genre-kit fields used by the seven above. That is deliberate and it is how they were commissioned: they describe forms with production constraints rather than genres with required beats, and the preservation problem in particular has nowhere to live except a Constraints block. The full entries they rank are in [`interactive-and-branching.md`](interactive-and-branching.md).

For the fictional genre about journalists, see Investigation and Journalism in `genres-inquiry.md`. For the documentary formats these genres are published in, see [`formats-doc.md`](formats-doc.md). For the documentary formats the first two kits extend, see `formats-doc.md`; for the interactive craft they draw on, see [`interactive-and-branching.md`](interactive-and-branching.md).

For the fictional genre about journalists, see Investigation and Journalism in `genres-inquiry.md`. For the documentary formats these genres are published in, see [`formats-doc.md`](formats-doc.md).

## Sources

Researched 2026-09-17.

- [John Truby's Story Beats for 14 Genres — The Elements of Writing](https://theelementsofwriting.com/truby-beats/)
- [The Anatomy of Genres — Macmillan](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374539221/theanatomyofgenres/)
- [What's the Difference Between Memoir and Personal Essay? — Hippocampus Magazine](https://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/2022/01/craft-whats-the-difference-between-memoir-and-personal-essay-by-suzanne-farrell-smith/)
- [Personal Essay and Memoir: How Content Shapes Form in Nonfiction — Write or Die Magazine](https://writeordiemag.com/essays/personal-essay-and-memoir-how-content-shapes-form-in-nonfiction)
- [What Is Memoir — And How Does It Differ From Autobiography and Personal Essay? — Write the World](https://blog.writetheworld.org/what-is-memoir-and-how-does-it-differ-from-autobiography-and-personal-essay)
- [Crafting Your Memoir: Storytelling, Reflection and Connection — National Centre for Writing](https://nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/writing-hub/crafting-your-memoir-a-guide-to-storytelling-reflection-and-connection/)
- [Writing About Real People: Libel, Defamation, Rights of Privacy and Publicity — The Authors Guild](https://authorsguild.org/resource/writing-about-real-people-libel-defamation-rights-of-privacy-and-publicity/)
- [Who Owns Your Story? The Ethics and Legality of Memoir — Book Riot](https://bookriot.com/ethics-and-legality-of-memoir/)
- [A Writer's Guide to Defamation and Invasion of Privacy — Writer's Digest](https://www.writersdigest.com/publishing-faqs/defamation-and-invasion)
- [SPJ Code of Ethics — Society of Professional Journalists](https://www.spj.org/spj-code-of-ethics/)
- [In Depth: SPJ's Code of Ethics — SPJ Ethics Central](https://ethicscentral.org/ethicscode/)
- [Professional Codes of Ethics — The American Journalism Handbook, LibreTexts](https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/07:_Journalism_Law_and_Ethics/7.05:_Professional_Codes_of_Ethics)
- [How to Write a Biography: A 7-Step Guide — Reedsy](https://reedsy.com/blog/how-to-write-a-biography/)
- [Crafting Compelling Biographies — Number Analytics](https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/ultimate-guide-biography-historical-writing)
- [Writing Effective Op-Eds — Duke Communicator Toolkit](https://communicators.duke.edu/writing-media/writing-effective-op-eds/)
- [The Discipline of the Steelman — Edge Induced Cohesion](https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2026/05/11/the-discipline-of-the-steelman-what-it-takes-to-represent-an-opposing-argument-fairly-and-why-doing-so-strengthens-ones-rhetorical-credibility/)
- [Steelmanning: How to Find the Truth by Helping Your Opponent — The Mind Collection](https://themindcollection.com/steelmanning-how-to-discover-the-truth-by-helping-your-opponent/)
- [Less Is More: Minimalism in Documentation — KnowledgeOwl](https://www.knowledgeowl.com/blog/posts/minimalism-documentation)
- [Minimalism in Technical Writing: A Guide — Archbee](https://www.archbee.com/blog/minimalism-in-technical-writing)
- [Creating Minimalist Instruction, John Carroll — IU ScholarWorks](https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ijdl/article/download/12887/19557/33610)
- [The Craft (and Art) of Scientific Writing — Nature Cancer](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-023-00579-y)
- [Finding Your Scientific Story by Writing Backwards — Marine Life Science & Technology](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42995-021-00120-z)
- [Writers' Uncertainty in Scientific and Popular Biomedical Articles — PMC](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6728051/)
- [Beyond Hero and Villain Narratives in Ecology and Conservation Science — PMC](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12539344/)

Interactive, testimony and museum kits added 2026-09-17.

- [Web documentary — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_documentary)
- [Bear 71 — MIT Docubase](https://docubase.mit.edu/project/bear-71/)
- [Fort McMoney — MIT Docubase](https://docubase.mit.edu/project/fort-mcmoney/)
- [Hollow: An Interactive Documentary — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow:_An_Interactive_Documentary)
- [Journey to the End of Coal — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_End_of_Coal)
- [COME/IN/DOC: Interactive Documentary Features, Part 3 — MIT Open Documentary Lab](https://opendoclab.mit.edu/comeindoc-interactive-documentary-features-part-3)
- [Update or Die: Future Proofing Emerging Digital Documentary Forms — MIT Open Documentary Lab](https://opendoclab.mit.edu/update-die-future-proofing-emerging-digital-documentary-forms)
- [Resurrection of Zig: A Digital Preservation Case Study — MIT Docubase](https://docubase.mit.edu/lab/case-studies/resurrection-of-zig-a-digital-preservation-case-study)
- [NFB and Rhizome collaborate to broaden the technical capabilities and impact of Webrecorder — Government of Canada](https://www.canada.ca/en/national-film-board/news/2018/12/national-film-board-of-canada-and-rhizome-collaborate-to-broaden-the-technical-capabilities-and-impact-of-webrecorder.html)
- [Gone Flash — Smithsonian Institution Archives](https://siarchives.si.edu/blog/gone-flash)
- [Korsakow — korsakow.org](https://korsakow.org/)
- [Dimensions in Testimony — USC Shoah Foundation](https://sfi.usc.edu/dit)
- [Dimensions in Testimony — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensions_in_Testimony)
- [OHA Statement on Ethics — Oral History Association](https://oralhistory.org/oha-statement-on-ethics/)
- [Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation — New Books Network](https://newbooksnetwork.com/interactive-cinema)
- [Interactive Documentary and Non-Fiction Media: Relational Practice and (De)Stabilized Reception — MIT Press Bookstore](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9783837679045)
- [Writing interpretive text — Norfolk Record Office](https://www.archives.norfolk.gov.uk/article/31009/Writing-interpretive-text)
- [SI Guide to Interpretive Writing for Exhibitions — Smithsonian Exhibits](https://exhibits.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/SI-Guide-to-Interpretive-Writing-for-Exhibitions.pdf)
- [Getting it write — Victoria and Albert Museum](https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/getting-it-write)
- [Museum title cards — Purdue OWL](https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_art_history/museum_title_cards.html)
- [How to Implement Scrollytelling — The Pudding](https://pudding.cool/process/how-to-implement-scrollytelling/)
- [Avoiding False Equivalence — PBS Standards](https://www.pbs.org/standards/blogs/standards-articles/avoiding-false-equivalence)
- [Unequal Time: When Is Fair and Balanced a Public Disservice? — PBS Public Editor](https://www.pbs.org/publiceditor/blogs/pbs-public-editor/unequal-time-when-is-fair-and-balanced-a-public-disservice)
- [Balance vs. Bias in Journalism — NPR](https://www.npr.org/2006/04/17/5346256/balance-vs-bias-in-journalism)
- [Algorithms are reshaping our news-reading habits, should we worry? — CORDIS, European Commission](https://www.cordis.europa.eu/article/id/434332-algorithms-are-reshaping-our-newsreading-habits-should-we-worry)
- [News Personalization and Public Service Media: The Audience Perspective in Three European Countries — Media and Communication (MDPI)](https://www.mdpi.com/2673-5172/4/1/22/html)