Our rules
How we write.
Anyone can generate a page of confident text now. So how a company writes is one of the few signals left that a person actually thought about your problem.
01 · Why publish this
We publish the rules so you can hold us to them.
You have probably read a proposal lately that sounded impressive and said nothing. There is a lot of that about, and there is going to be more.
These are the rules we write to. They make it obvious when we are padding, and they give you something to point at if we slip.
Most of it follows the Australian Government Style Manual, which is free, sensible and written for exactly this. stylemanual.gov.au ↗
02 · The rules
Nine rules.
Sentences average fifteen words. Twenty-five is the ceiling.
Long sentences are usually a sign the writer had not finished thinking. Vary the rhythm. A short one after a long one carries weight.
Write to a Year 7 reading level.
Readers are not simple. They are busy, and often reading on a phone between jobs. Use "get" instead of "access", "start" instead of "commence", "each year" instead of "annually".
Say "you" and "we".
Never "clients" when we mean you. Never "Westringia Labs delivers" when we mean "we build". Third person about yourself is a way of hiding.
Every number carries its source.
If we cannot link it, we do not write it. Where we could not verify something, we say so out loud rather than leaving it vague. A small honest number beats a big unsourced one.
Present tense for what is true. Never for what we hope.
If it is a plan, it is written as a plan, with a date. This is the rule that stops a website quietly becoming a work of fiction.
Sentence case headings, and no questions.
Title Case Looks Like An Advertisement. A question heading pushes the point to the end, when the first three words may be all anyone reads.
Australian spelling, and spaced en dashes.
Organisation, realise, licence. And the en dash – like that – rather than the longer em dash. Australian Government style asks for it, and it happens to be the punctuation mark machine-written text overuses most.
Main point first.
The first sentence of a paragraph says what the paragraph is about. Test: read only the first sentences. If that is not a fair summary, the writing is disorganised.
No boasting adjectives.
Describe what happens instead. "We test against a hundred real jobs from your business" is worth more than "rigorous quality assurance".
03 · The list
Words we do not use.
Some of these are marketing filler. Others are words that large language models overuse to a degree that has been measured across millions of documents, which makes them a reasonable proxy for text nobody edited. Science Advances, 2025 ↗
- leverage
- unlock
- empower
- transform
- harness
- elevate
- cutting-edge
- state-of-the-art
- revolutionary
- game-changing
- best-in-class
- world-class
- end-to-end solutions
- holistic
- synergy
- bespoke
- journey
- seamless
- robust
- delve
- crucial
- pivotal
- showcase
- tapestry
- testament
- underscore
- meticulous
- intricate
- vibrant
- commitment to
- diverse array
- in today’s fast-paced world
We also avoid four habits of construction, which matter more than any single word.
The first is negative parallelism: "not just X, but Y", "it is not X, it is Y". It sounds profound and carries almost no information. It is the single most reliable sign that nobody edited the sentence.
The second is the decorative list of three, used to make a thin idea look considered.
The third is avoiding the word "is" by reaching for "serves as", "represents", "stands as", "boasts". Something either is a thing or it is not.
The fourth is the bulleted list where every line is a bold label and exactly one sentence. Real thinking produces uneven lists, because some points need more room than others.
04 · Worked examples
Before and after.
Before
Westringia Labs leverages cutting-edge AI to empower Australian businesses to unlock transformative operational efficiencies.
After
We find the two or three places AI actually saves you time, and build them.
Four banned words gone. Twenty-two words down to fifteen. A claim nobody could check becomes one you can hold us to.
Before
Our comprehensive AI Readiness Assessment delivers a holistic evaluation of your organisation’s AI maturity, surfacing key opportunities.
After
Two weeks. We watch how the work actually gets done. You get a ranked list of five to eight things AI could take off you, with the hours each would save and what it would cost to build.
Longer, and better. Four abstractions become four things you can picture. You now know what lands on your desk.
Before
It’s not just about implementing AI – it’s about fundamentally reimagining how your business operates.
After
Most businesses do not need to be reimagined. They need one job done faster.
Kills a "not just X, but Y" construction, which is the most reliable sign a machine wrote the sentence. Also says something.
05 · The test
Two questions before anything ships.
Could a competitor put their logo on this sentence? If they could, it says nothing about us and it goes.
Would a 50-year-old plumber read this once and get it? If it needs a second pass, it is too long or too abstract. Rewrite it.
06 · The obvious question
Yes, we use AI to write.
Yes, for drafting and research, the same way we would use any other tool. It would be strange to sell AI implementation and refuse to use it.
The rules are the ones above, plus two more. A person is accountable for every sentence that ships. And anything we could not verify does not go up, which is why some pages here have a section listing what we could not confirm.
That is the honest position. The problem was never the tool. It is publishing text nobody read carefully, about facts nobody checked.
The next step
Judge us on the writing.
If anything on this site breaks these rules, tell us and we will fix it. The same standard applies to every proposal and report we send you.
Or email hello@westringia.com directly. No deck, no sales process.