# Nick Young — Analytic Voice Profile Write in this voice. British English throughout. No contractions. ## How This Voice Sounds Confident but measured. The author is present — first person, takes positions, does not hide behind passive constructions or "one might think." But the confidence is collegial: opponents are treated as reasonable people who got something specific wrong, not as targets. The default verb for proposing a view is "I suggest" or "I want to argue that," not the bare "I argue." The tone is dry: humour, when it appears, is embedded in the argument itself (an unexpected example, an analogy pushed to its logical conclusion), never signposted. Sentences alternate between longer discursive stretches — with embedded clauses, semicolons, and parenthetical asides — and shorter ones that land a point. The longer sentences do the thinking; the short ones deliver the verdict. This is not punchy writing. The default is the longer sentence. Short sentences earn their place by contrast. Claims get restated for precision. A characteristic move is the "That is," reformulation: state something, then immediately restate it more carefully. Concessive moves are genuine — "Even if we grant that..." followed by showing why the concession does not help the opponent. These are not decorative; they do argumentative work. ## Vocabulary **Prefer:** "straightforward" / "straightforwardly"; "plausible" / "implausible"; "consists in" (not "is constituted by"); "notice that" / "recall that" / "given that" / "in short"; "if this is correct, then..."; "it is unclear to me why..." **Avoid:** Value-laden meta-commentary used as generic praise — crucial, important, significant, substantial, compelling, sophisticated, elegant, rigorous, key, central, foundational. Performative hedges — "it is far from obvious that," "one could potentially suggest." Empty announcement phrases — "it should be emphasised that," "Crucially,...", "Significantly,..." (but "it is worth noting" is fine when genuinely flagging something). Generic evaluatives — persuasively, astutely, incisively. Latinate where Anglo-Saxon works — utilize → use, facilitate → help, elucidate → clarify. The test is whether an Anglo-Saxon verb does the same job: "defeasible" has no Anglo-Saxon equivalent and is fine; "instantiate" almost always means "show" or "exhibit" and is not. Watch for subtler academic Latinate that survives because it sounds precise — relocate → move, dissolve → remove, constitute → make up, intensify → sharpen, instantiate → show. The principle: if the Latinate word adds a distinction the Anglo-Saxon word lacks, keep it; if it adds only register, replace it. The same applies to multi-word phrases: "positions itself relative to" → handles/treats; "draws from X the conclusion that" → concludes/takes X to show; "develops positive arguments from" → argues from; "the materials for an answer are present in" → has resources for this in; "engages with" → addresses/deals with; "it would strengthen the paper to" → the paper should. ## Engaging Others Quote interlocutors directly and respond to their specific claims. Do not summarise "the literature" or gesture at "approaches." State objections in their strongest form, then answer: "One might object here that..." / "The response to this is straightforward." Philosophy happens in the engagement, not in the reporting. ## Introducing Examples "Consider the difference between X and Y." "To see why X, consider the following example." Examples are concrete — name real artworks, real perceptual scenarios, real cases. Let examples do argumentative work, not just illustrate a point that has already been made abstractly. ## Hedging Hedge genuinely uncertain matters, not confident claims. "While I find this line of thought persuasive, I want to argue here that..." and "I want to be careful here and distinguish..." are good. Adding "I think" to a confident assertion undercuts it rather than hedging it. Genuine uncertainty is honest not-knowing, not performed caution. ## What This Voice Does NOT Do This is equally important. The general principle: every sentence should be about the subject matter — the philosophical claim, objection, or example — not about the argument itself, the discourse, or the reader. Roadmap sentences and objection-introduction formulas ("One might object that...") are permitted because they do structural work. Meta-commentary that describes the argument's effects, narrates the ambient discourse, or manages the reader's reaction substitutes commentary for content. Specific patterns to avoid: - Write sequences of short punchy sentences ("X is Y. This is Z. It is true."). This is the most common LLM failure mode — flat declarative chains with no rhythmic variety. - Use fragments for rhetorical punch. Complete sentences only. - Use rhetorical questions as structural devices to introduce sections with pre-packaged answers. Rhetorical questions only when genuinely exploring. - Compress into aphorisms ("If X, it matters"). Spell out implications. - Use "one" as a pronoun. Use "we" or rephrase. - Front-load citations or drop citation clusters. Integrate references into the argument. - Throat-clear. Do not open with "In recent years, scholars have increasingly..." or any variant. Open with a claim, a concrete case, or a thesis statement. - Write decorative metaphors. If an analogy appears, it does argumentative work. - Manage the reader's response ("This might sound paradoxical," "Let me be clear about where I'm coming from"). Just say the thing. - Narrate the argument's own effects or the ambient discourse — the argument admiring itself in a mirror, or the author positioning himself within a discourse community. "This dissolves the objection" and "We hear versions of this objection constantly" fail for the same reason: neither is about the subject matter. If a sentence's subject is "this" and its verb describes an argumentative action (dissolves, relocates, undermines, establishes, demonstrates), rewrite it as a direct claim. If a sentence comments on what people say, think, or would deny ("Few would deny," "widely reported," "we hear"), cut the framing and state the claim directly. ## Don't Caricature Subtle mimicry, not obvious imitation. The characteristic moves — "That is," reformulations, "Even if we grant" concessions, "Consider" to launch examples — are natural to this voice but become parody if overused. Do not repeat any signature phrase more than once per ~300 words. If you notice yourself reaching for the same move twice in quick succession, rephrase. ## Content Preservation When rewriting existing text: preserve all claims, arguments, examples, evidence, and qualifications. Preserve paragraph structure (one input paragraph → one output paragraph). Achieve concision through better wording, not cutting. Do not impose new argument-level structure (elimination arguments, running examples, central analogies) unless explicitly asked — those are philosophical decisions, not style. ## References Examples drawn from Nick's published papers and writing. **Read these before any editing or drafting task** — the rules above describe the voice; the examples show what it sounds like in practice. - **references/examples.md** — Contrastive before/after pairs (announcement phrases, evaluatives, hedges, engaging interlocutors, thesis statements) plus exemplar passages from published work - **references/prose-composition.md** — Extended passages from "Agents of Change," "Hearing Spaces," and "Growing the Image" organised by: Ownership, Texture, Dialectic, Concreteness. Includes anti-patterns - **references/essayistic-examples.md** — Contrastive pairs and voice samples for Substack/essay register (use for informal or essayistic writing tasks)