# the version of section 2 of the aesthetics of llm s on todays daily note is terribly wriitten. do... ## Retrieval Notes - Session id: `ecab7052-7609-4340-96e9-f444e092e534` - Last activity: `2026-05-20T11:10:26.957Z` ## My Notes <!-- Add your notes here. This section is preserved across syncs. --> ## Conversation ### User the version of section 2 of the aesthetics of llm s on todays daily note is terribly wriitten. do a full, substantial pass on it. You are right. Restarting with the targeted revisions. I am going to keep what was useful, expand the detail, supply the counter-examples about paragraph openings, cut the examples section, and add an evaluation of my draft. --- # Analysis of Nick Young's Writing Style What follows is based on careful reading of seven of the uploaded papers: Hearing Objects and Events, Hearing Spaces, Sounds as Properties, Audition and Composite Sensory Individuals, Can Movement Be Depicted?, Growing the Image, and Beauty in Use. The analysis runs from the level of the word up to the level of the section. ## Section and paper openings Papers and sections almost always open by entering the substantive material rather than by describing what the paper will do. Hearing Spaces opens its first section with a question: "What do we hear? Three obvious candidates are sounds, properties of sounds, and echoes." Hearing Objects and Events opens its first section with a direct phenomenological observation: "Hallucinations notwithstanding, we have auditory experiences when sound waves hit our eardrums." Can Movement Be Depicted? opens: "It is natural to describe many pictures as of movement." Beauty in Use opens: "Good design seems like something that we can aesthetically appreciate." Audition and Composite Sensory Individuals opens with a question, then immediately a second question that refines the first: "What are the sensory individuals of audition? What are the entities our auditory system attributes properties to?" Notice what these openings have in common. They begin with the object of inquiry. They state what the inquiry is about by referring to the phenomenon rather than the inquiry. The voice is calm, the syntax is direct, the framing is immediate. But there are real exceptions, and they are concentrated in a particular place: the second paragraph of an introduction, where signposting of the paper's structure happens. In Hearing Spaces, after the substantive opening paragraph, the third paragraph contains: "I will argue here that our auditory experience of space is not 'exhausted' by our awareness of spatial relations between different sound sources and ourselves. Specifically, I will suggest that, when we hear sounds reverberate, we hear the unfilled space surrounding us." This is procedural. The "I will argue" / "I will suggest" formula does appear in Nick's prose. In Hearing Objects and Events, the opening section announces in its second paragraph: "The aim of this paper is to determine how we should understand such a notion." Section 2.1 opens: "Although the claim that we hear source events is popular, I shall argue in this section that it is not obvious how it should be understood." This is procedural too. The "I shall argue in this section" formula does appear. In Sounds as Properties, the introduction's second paragraph is a complete structural map: "In §1, I outline the reasons that Leddington gives... In §2, I argue that the case for events as the bearers of sound properties... In §3, I put forward a new account... In §4, I show that this view, Shape, retains the advantages..." In Beauty in Use, the introduction contains a four-paragraph structural map: "In Section 1 we introduce Parsons and Carlson's theory... In Section 2, we will examine Forsey's Kant-inspired view... In Section 3, we introduce what we call 'the question of difficulty'... In Section 4, we explore the agentive phenomenology..." So the truth is more specific than "Nick never starts procedurally." The truth is this: the first sentence is almost always substantive, but procedural sentences appear in two well-defined places. The first is the structural-map paragraph of an introduction, which lays out the paper. The second is a sentence within a section's opening paragraph that signals what the section will argue (typically the second or third sentence, after a substantive lead). The procedural sentence is never the way a section starts; it appears once the reader has been brought into the topic. Where procedural sentences appear, they are short and committed. "I shall argue", "I will suggest", "we will examine", "we propose". They are not hedge-laden announcements of intent ("I will here try to consider what might be said about..."). They state directly what the paper or section does. The implications for drafting are sharp. Procedural sentences are permitted, but their placement is tightly constrained: not in section openings, and never at the head of a paragraph that is doing dialectical work. ## Paragraph-level openings The repertoire of paragraph-opening moves within sections is wider than the section-opening repertoire. But the same principle holds, with comparable exceptions. The recurrent move is the **direct claim opening**, where the first sentence states a position the paragraph will develop. "Even if we accept Leddington's reasons for thinking Property superior to its competitors, we might still ask why we should accept the idea that events rather than objects are the bearers of sounds." "Against the idea that objects are heard Leddington says..." "We can think of pictures as representing in two types of way." The **interlocutor-led opening** is also common. "Leddington agrees that these are good reasons to give up Parthood, but thinks that Property should be preferred over Identity." "In making the case for Property, Leddington compares the view to two other recent accounts of the relation between sounds and sources." "O'Callaghan suggests that, sources 'meet causal requirements on auditory perception...'" The choice of speech-act verb is deliberate — "argues" and "claims" carry argumentative weight; "says" is neutral; "suggests" is gentler. The verb is calibrated to the role the interlocutor is playing. The **concessive pivot** appears throughout, especially where dialectic is unfolding. "However, even if we grant that sounds are heard to bear these types of properties, we might still doubt that this amounts to the sources of sounds themselves being represented in auditory experience." "On the other hand, identifying source events with vibratory events does have one advantage over thinking of sources as interaction events." "Despite this, however, the following passage suggests that Anscomb still believes AI systems play some sort of agentive role." The concession is genuine; the paragraph works through the conceded point before pivoting. The **conditional opening** sets up a framework to be tested. "If Midjourney's artistic role is that of an agent, then it could play a variety of different agentive roles." "If, for the sake of argument, we concede that Midjourney is an agent in Anscomb's sense, we are left with the dilemma..." "If this is correct, we can ask what types of feature a given perceptual modality is oriented towards." The conditional carries argumentative weight; it lets the paragraph try out a position without endorsement. The **clarification or definition opening** appears when a term is at risk of sliding. "It is necessary to clarify what I mean by 'hear'." "What is reverberation?" Both clarifications are then given directly. The **concept pull-forward opening** picks up something live from the previous paragraph and moves it one step. "These reflected sound waves are commonly thought of in terms of hearing echoes. However, I suggest that there is an interesting and important distinction to be made..." "We might think that this latter point is fatal, and that any investigation as to whether a static image can depict a moving object is a non-starter. However, we should not be so quick." The **direct phenomenological opening** brings the reader to a recognisable case. "Hallucinations notwithstanding, we have auditory experiences when sound waves hit our eardrums." "It is natural to describe many pictures as of movement." "Good design seems like something that we can aesthetically appreciate." Now the exceptions. Some paragraphs in the corpus do open procedurally. They tend to be section-summary paragraphs at the end of an introduction ("In what follows, we shall examine various proposals about the nature of the sensory individuals of source hearing, and show that..." in Audition). They tend to be section-handover paragraphs ("In Section 1 we introduce Parsons and Carlson's theory of Functional Beauty..."). And within argumentative sections, a paragraph occasionally opens with a brief procedural lead before turning to the substance ("In §2, I argue that the case for events..."). The pattern is similar to that for section openings: procedural openings exist but are concentrated in particular structural roles. What does not appear at the head of paragraphs anywhere in the corpus is the generic LLM opening: "This paragraph examines...", "In what follows, we will see...", "Let us now turn to...", "Having established X, we can now address Y." There are no instances of these. Another pattern about paragraph openings worth registering: where a paragraph picks up after a quoted passage, the opening verb usually does specific dialectical work. After a quotation from O'Callaghan, the paragraph might open: "We can see that the authors are sympathetic to the idea that..." or "There are many different possible ways in which..." or "However, even if we grant that..." The quotation is engaged immediately and substantively. ## Sentence-level patterns Sentence length varies substantially within paragraphs. Short, declarative sentences appear regularly ("It is natural to describe many pictures as of movement.") and are placed for emphasis. Long sentences carrying multiple argumentative tasks appear too. The average is in the middle. The variation is significant: paragraphs are not strings of equally-weighted sentences. A characteristic Nick move is the claim-then-development sentence structure within a paragraph. The first sentence states a position. The next two or three develop, qualify, or specify. Then a sentence advances the dialectic, either by introducing an objection or by pulling the consequence. This is not a fixed template but a recurrent rhythm. Subordinate clauses are deployed heavily for qualification and specification. Relative clauses ("which", "that", "where") restrict or expand nouns. "Sounds, properties of sounds, and echoes." "We hear the chime of a bell, its timbre and pitch, and—in some cases—its echo a moment later." "It is just as natural to say 'I heard the bell' as it is to say 'I heard the ringing'." The relative clauses do real work. The colon is used for a specific function: introducing a specification or unpacking of what was just said. "We very often learn what sort of source event is taking place just from what we hear: if you close your eyes and I roll a bowling ball across the floor you will learn that a heavy, hard, round, object is rolling..." "Sounds without reverberation sound 'dry' and unnatural: a sound engineer would never record an electric guitar straight into a mixing desk without also adding some artificial reverberation..." The sentence after the colon is usually long and substantive. The colon does not introduce a definition; it introduces an extended elaboration. The em-dash performs a different job. It carries appositive or parenthetical specifications tightly bound to the surrounding sentence. The em-dash insert is usually one phrase, not a whole clause. "Sound waves will have further to travel if the listener and source are located at the centre of a large room than of a small one." "—which are referred to as 'early reflections'—" "—the experience of performing complex actions with a sense of ease." The em-dash is used sparingly. Most paragraphs have one or none. Few paragraphs have more than one. The semicolon joins independent clauses that contrast or compare without subordination. "Just as the aesthetic experience of the dancer, according to Montero, is rooted in the sense of performing a difficult task with ease, we argue that the user experience relevant to the aesthetics of design is similarly grounded." "These qualities are identical to or depend on worldly instantiations of, respectively, frequency, spectral composition, and amplitude." Many sentences are constructed around contrast: "Whereas X, Y..." or "While X, Y...". These contrastive sentences do philosophical comparison work. "Whereas an object can be seen as either moving or staying still, no such dichotomy exists for colours or shapes." "While it is possible to see a horse as unmoving, it is impossible, or at least very unusual, to see it as unshaped, or uncoloured as un-located." Sentences with multiple coordinated clauses appear regularly, but each clause is doing distinct work. The coordination is argumentative rather than decorative. ## Word choice and vocabulary A small set of hedging and modal vocabulary appears with very high frequency. These words are not decorative. Each has a recognisable dialectical role. "Might" is the workhorse hedger. "We might think that this is surprising." "We might also ask whether..." "We might say that..." "Might" introduces a position the paragraph will examine, often as a candidate that will be tested or as a possibility being explored. "Natural" marks a position that is initially attractive but will be examined. "It is natural to describe many pictures as of movement." "Hallucinations notwithstanding, we have auditory experiences..." A "natural" position is being put on the table for consideration. "Obvious" works similarly. "There is an obvious alternative to thinking of Midjourney as an agent." "Three obvious candidates are..." "The most obvious, common sense, answer to this question would be..." "Obvious" flags a candidate, not a settled truth. "Plausible" is used to grant a position partial standing. "It is plausible to suppose that the function of the auditory system, like all perceptual systems, is to provide us with useful information..." "A weaker, and arguably more plausible, interpretation of Property..." "Seem(s)" is the most frequent hedger. "It seems difficult to deny that there is some sort of dependency relation between them." "It does not seem, however, to be the case." "It does not seem as though objects and events are as distinct from each other as the phrase 'rather than' suggests." "Seems" marks where appearance and reality may come apart and where the paragraph is examining the appearance. "Indeed" appears as an emphatic continuation, used sparingly. "Indeed, we have a specific label, 'still life'..." "Indeed, they say that interaction events that we hear, such as collisions, just are the sounds that we hear." "Rather" works as substitution. "Rather, retinal stimulation is thought to elicit representations of things in the world..." "Rather, hearing a striking and hearing its sound is to hear one and the same event." Note that "rather" is used as a substitution marker rather than as part of the prohibited "not X but rather Y" pattern. What is conspicuously absent from the corpus: emphatic adverbs used as filler — "absolutely", "completely", "utterly", "entirely" — in normal philosophical work, except where the proposition genuinely calls for them. "Important", "crucial", "key" appear, but sparingly, and almost never as filler. When "important" appears, it usually does specific work: signalling a contrast that does turn on importance ("an interesting and important distinction to be made between hearing a sound reverberate and hearing a sound echo"). Latinate vocabulary is present where the philosophical concept is technical (sensory individuals, perceptual systems, intentionality, propositional content), but where a plain word will do, a plain word appears. "Objects", "things", "events", "stuff" appear regularly. Verbs of choice are "argue", "say", "think", "claim", "suggest", "show", "put forward". The verbs do not strain. Scare quotes are very rare in the main body. Quotation marks appear in three roles: to mention terms as terms ('hear', 'echo chamber', 'dry'); to introduce labels for positions (Property, Identity, Parthood); to quote sources verbatim. They are not used to flag irony or to distance from a word's ordinary use. ## Clause-level features A recurrent feature: parenthetical inserts that supply specific cases, brief enough not to break the main sentence. "(e.g. a wooden window frame rattling, a glass shattering)". "(e.g. Kulvicki 2008)". "—the experience of performing complex actions with a sense of ease—". These inserts are short and concrete. They do not pile up. Another recurrent feature: the negated alternative or "as opposed to" construction. "We very often become aware from auditory experience of what sort of source event is taking place... immediately and without conscious inference." "Whether audible qualities are dispositions, physical properties, primitive qualities, or projected sensory qualities, their instances depend upon the physical properties..." The negation is direct, not theatrical. A frequent structural feature is the comparative-with-vision argument. Hearing is examined through comparison with vision: how vision works, how hearing differs. The structure recurs because hearing is the topic but vision is the comparison case. The two-modality contrast is set up to do work. ## Engagement with interlocutors Other philosophers are engaged directly and by name. Block quotations are used regularly and at substantial length. The quoted passage is usually followed by a paraphrase or gloss that picks out what the author is committed to, then by the response. "O'Callaghan says that, sources 'meet causal requirements on auditory perception, and it would be severe to deny they belong among what it seems to us we hear' (2011, p. 1)" — quotation folded into a sentence. Quotations that are set off as block quotes are typically introduced by a single sentence that says what is about to come: "As O'Callaghan (2007) puts it:". Then the block. Then a paragraph that engages the block. The framing verb attached to an interlocutor tells you what they are doing argumentatively. The verbs used in this role include "argues", "says", "suggests", "claims", "puts it", "writes", "agrees", "compares", "is sympathetic to", "is concerned that", "is explicit that". The choice is calibrated. When multiple opponents are clustered, they are distinguished by their specific commitments rather than gathered into a generic group. "On O'Callaghan's (2011) Parthood view, sounds and sources are different types of event... According to Casati et al.'s (2013) view, Identity, sounds simply are source events..." The opponent's position is restated in compact form before engagement. What is absent: the literature-review label. There are no instances of "the literature on X has long debated...", "much has been written about...", "scholars have argued...", "there is a growing body of work that...". Each interlocutor enters through a specific commitment, not through a generalised group. ## Argumentative moves A recurrent dialectical structure: state a view, give the strongest reasons for it, give a problem, give a response, evaluate. The view is not strawmanned at entry. The problem is given as a genuine difficulty. A second recurrent structure: examine three candidates, show that two have problems, build the third. This is the spine of Hearing Spaces (candidate accounts of reverberation), Hearing Objects and Events (candidate accounts of source hearing), Sounds as Properties (candidate views of sounds), and Can Movement Be Depicted? (three proposals from Le Poidevin). The three-candidate structure is recurrent enough to count as a signature. A third pattern: the elimination-conclusion paragraph. After a sequence of failed alternatives, a paragraph opens with "Given that..." or "We have seen that..." and draws the upshot. These are usually calm — the work is given by the prior sequence, not by emphatic phrasing. Footnotes do specific work. They often expand a technical detail that would slow the main text ("Strictly speaking, the unit of generation is a token..."). They often supply a reference that elaborates rather than just citing ("Nudds [2009: 73–4] summarises how and why frequency components of sound waves are grouped together"). They sometimes float a related thought without committing to it ("It is possible that humans who use echolocation, such as Daniel Kish, are an exception to this..."). Footnotes are not used to bury claims that should be in the main text. ## Paragraph closings Paragraph endings tend to perform one of two functions: they close the move the paragraph has been making, or they pivot into the next paragraph by introducing the next move. Closings of the first kind: "Both options are unsatisfying." "And so, by identifying sounds with combinations of these audible qualities, Property keeps sounds out of reach of non-hearers." "If this is not possible, what reason do we have to think that we hear these sounds as parts connected to other – unheard – parts of sources, and therefore, what reason do we have to think that we are mediately perceiving the source after all?" Closings of the second kind: "In other words, regardless of the merits of Nudds' proposal, we might prefer to find an account on which sources are auditorily represented in their own right." "We can see then that an account of movement depiction is not only desirable, but is not, at least not obviously, impossible. The remainder of this paper will be spent trying to develop just such an account." Either way, the closing does work. It does not summarise the paragraph for the reader's benefit and it does not pad. ## What does not appear Several things one might expect from contemporary academic philosophy are absent or rare. Bullet points and numbered lists do not appear in the main prose. Where multiple items are coordinated, they appear in syntactic coordination within sentences. Italics for emphasis are very rare. Italics are used for technical terms, foreign phrases, titles of works, and labels for positions (Property, Identity, Parthood, *natura naturans*). Bold appears only in titles and section headings. Generic academic filler phrases are absent or rare. There are essentially no instances of "It should be noted that", "It is worth pointing out", "An interesting question is", "This is a fascinating issue", "The literature is divided", "Much has been written about", or "Recent work suggests". When something needs to be noted, it is noted without ceremony. The phrase "raises the question" is essentially absent. Questions are asked outright. Throat-clearing before claims is rare. Few instances of "I would argue that", "I want to suggest that", "It seems to me that". Claims are typically given directly: "I argue that...", "I claim that...", "We argue that..." Negative summary constructions are rare. The corpus does not contain elaborate negation patterns like "I do not deny that... but I also do not affirm that..." Negation is direct. Transitional phrases at paragraph openings are restrained. "However", "On the other hand", "In contrast" appear but not in every paragraph. Most paragraph transitions are carried by substantive openings. The emphatic underliner — "indeed", "in fact", "crucially" — appears, but sparingly. When it appears it is doing work. Adverbs of mood and certainty ("certainly", "surely", "clearly", "undoubtedly") are extremely rare. Where they appear, they appear at points where the writer is committing or pushing back, not as default modifiers. The phrase "it is interesting that" or "interestingly" is largely absent. Where it appears, it carries dialectical force ("it is interesting to note that, while contemporary theories of sound and audition have considered the ontology and perception of echoes..."). --- ## Evaluation of my Section 2 draft against this style Reading my draft against the patterns above, the contrast is substantial. **Opening of the section.** My draft opens: "LLMs are manmade artefacts. By Carlson's lights, this looks decisive: design appreciation is the mode appropriate to manmade things, and we should appreciate LLMs as we appreciate other artefacts shaped by their makers for use." Compared with Nick's section openings, this is flat. "LLMs are manmade artefacts" has none of the texture of "Hallucinations notwithstanding, we have auditory experiences when sound waves hit our eardrums" or "It is natural to describe many pictures as of movement." Nick's openings give the reader a phenomenon to grip. Mine gives a declarative. The second sentence — "By Carlson's lights, this looks decisive" — is meta. It comments on the appearance of decisiveness rather than entering the dialectic. Nick would more often put the candidate forward directly without telling the reader how decisive it looks. **Paragraph 2.** My draft has: "Whether the answer is right depends on what an appreciator of an LLM engages with. Aesthetic appreciation responds to qualities, and those qualities have to be borne by something the appreciator is in contact with." Two problems. First, "Whether the answer is right depends on" is procedural — it sets up a test rather than entering it. Nick would more often enter through a question, an interlocutor, a candidate, or a phenomenon. Second, "Aesthetic appreciation responds to qualities" uses an abstract noun phrase as the grammatical subject. Nick's prose more often has concrete subjects: "we", "the appreciator", "the bell", "the bike". Abstract subjects are reserved for cases where the abstraction is genuinely the topic. "Aesthetic appreciation" doing the work of the sentence here is bloodless where Nick would prefer something with grip. **Paragraph 3.** "For paradigm functional artefacts, what an appreciator engages with is what designers specified." This opens with a generic framing — "For paradigm functional artefacts" — where Nick would more often enter through the specific case. He would write "Consider a bike" or "Take a bike" or just "A bike's appearance and the way it rides are both consequences of how it was designed". The generic frame is removable; the example carries the work. **Paragraph 4.** "For an LLM, this chain does not run." The "chain" metaphor is mine, introduced two paragraphs earlier, and I rely on it heavily. Nick uses metaphors more sparingly. He would more likely make the point without leaning on the chain image. Also, "this chain does not run" is itself a slightly forced construction. "Does not run" is doing rhetorical work that the philosophy could carry without it. **Paragraph 5, the technical exposition.** "The gap between designer specification and text production is built into how the system works." Two problems. "The gap... is built into" is metaphor-heavy — the gap and the building are both figurative. "How the system works" is informal in a register Nick rarely uses. Nick's technical exposition would more likely be matter-of-fact: "An LLM generates text one token at a time" rather than "The gap... is built into how the system works." The next several sentences in this paragraph are short and uniformly declarative: "The system generates text one token at a time. At each step it takes the context so far... The token then joins the context, and the next step proceeds from there..." Nick's paragraphs have more variation in sentence length and structure. Mine reads as a series of brief declaratives. The paragraph also has two parallel "What designers choose..." / "What they do not choose..." constructions in succession. This is the kind of two-part rhetorical parallelism Nick uses occasionally but not as load-bearing structure. **Paragraph 6, the Olah quote.** The introducer is: "Olah's image captures the point." "Captures the point" is exactly the kind of metacommentary Nick avoids. Nick would more likely use "Olah puts it like this" or "Olah writes" or "As Olah puts it". The frame would be direct, not interpretive. After the quote, my draft has: "The architecture is the scaffold. The training objective is the light. The configuration that emerges is grown, not written." This is a three-part rhetorical structure with parallel syntax. Nick's prose does not normally use rhetorical triplets of this kind. They read as oratorical. **Paragraph 7, the configuration verdict.** "What design knowledge can illuminate is upstream of what appreciation responds to." The "upstream" metaphor is repeated from earlier and used as machinery. Nick would more likely say something concrete: design knowledge concerns the conditions under which the system was made; it does not concern the text we read. The paragraph ends: "For a bike, what design knowledge illuminates and what appreciation responds to are the same things. For an LLM, they come apart." The two-part parallel structure ("For a bike... For an LLM...") is the rhetorical scaffolding I have been leaning on throughout. Nick's prose uses this kind of parallel comparison, but not in every section closing. **Paragraph 8.** "A second consideration runs independently of the first." This is metacommentary about the argument's structure. Nick's prose avoids this kind of structural announcement. "Carlson's design appreciation runs through form-follows-function." The verb "runs through" is the same verb I used in the previous paragraph ("the chain does not run"). The reuse is unintentional but visible: I have leaned on the same small set of metaphors throughout. **Paragraph 9.** "The closest candidates are the training objective — predicting the next token in a sequence — and the deployment intention — being a helpful assistant." The construction stacks two parallel em-dashes for two parallel candidates. Nick's prose uses em-dashes more sparingly and does not normally pair them within a single sentence. "The configuration is functionally promiscuous." "Functionally promiscuous" is more Latinate than Nick's normal vocabulary. He would prefer something plainer. A plainer version: the same configuration supports many uses, and it was shaped to none of them in particular. **Paragraph 10, the joint verdict.** "Both considerations push in the same direction." Metacommentary. "Design knowledge of an LLM reaches what designers fixed about the system. These are upstream of what appreciation responds to." The "upstream" metaphor returns for the third time. The sentence pattern is the same as the previous verdict paragraph. "Together they put the matter beyond dispute." "Put the matter beyond dispute" is more dramatic than Nick's normal register. Nick would more likely say something undemonstrative. **Paragraph 11, the transition.** "The text we read presents in person-like ways." The construction "presents in person-like ways" is strained. "Reading an LLM's output is much like reading writing by a person." The next sentence restates the first. Two sentences making the same point. "The natural next thought is that what design knowledge cannot supply, person knowledge can." This is formulaic. The closing — "Section 3 takes the question up" — is fine and clean. --- **General patterns across the draft.** Em-dashes are overused. I have multiple em-dashes per paragraph in several places. Nick uses em-dashes more sparingly, with most paragraphs containing one or none. The grammatical subjects of my sentences are often abstract nouns ("aesthetic appreciation responds to qualities", "design knowledge reaches the conditions", "the configuration supports many activities"). Nick's prose more often has concrete subjects. Two-part rhetorical parallels appear throughout my draft as load-bearing structure ("For a bike... For an LLM...", "What designers choose... What they do not choose..."). These are occasional moves in Nick's prose but not structural backbone. Metaphors are reused as machinery. "Chain", "upstream", "track", "runs through", "reach" — these spatial-mechanical metaphors carry the argument. Nick uses such metaphors sparingly and does not let them become the load-bearing structure of a section. Metacommentary on argument structure appears at several paragraph openings: "A second consideration runs independently of the first", "Both considerations push in the same direction". Nick avoids this kind of announcement. The hedge vocabulary Nick uses with specific dialectical functions — "natural", "obvious", "plausible", "might", "seems" — barely appears in my draft. Where I use them at all, they are not calibrated to dialectical role. Sentence-length variation is minimal. Most of my sentences are medium-length. Nick's paragraphs typically contain a wider range, with short declaratives placed for emphasis among longer development sentences. The draft contains no interlocutor entry. Apart from the Olah block quote, no paragraph enters through another philosopher's claim. Nick frequently uses interlocutor entry to start paragraphs. The draft contains no dialectical structure. Each paragraph asserts and develops; none stages a view, gives the strongest reasons for it, raises a problem, and works through. Nick's typical paragraph structure is more dialectical. No paragraph in my draft is constructed around the comparative-with-vision template or any analogous template that the rest of Nick's corpus uses heavily. The bike comparison appears but only as a single contrast, not developed in the way Nick develops his comparison cases. The verbs attached to designers and to the system in my draft are bland ("specify", "fix", "reach", "produce"). Nick's verbs do dialectical work.