Voice

The Bulletin writes in a direct, restrained, thesis-publication register. The sentences are working sentences. We use the first person plural (“the Bulletin”, “we”) for editorial positions; we use the contributor’s first name in interior self-reference (“Aksoy has argued”, “Halloran notes”). We do not use the second person except in instructional formats (the FAQ, this style guide).

The Bulletin’s editorial principle, attributed in print to Aksoy, is say it plainly, then defend it for the rest of the piece. Pieces that buried the lede have been corrected after the fact; pieces that overclaim and then under-defend have been pulled.

Capitalization

• Web4 — always capitalized, no space, no hyphen. The single-token form is the Bulletin’s canonical spelling. Web4 is a category name; it covers many companies.
• Agentic, autonomy layer,orchestration layer — lowercase in body. Capitalize only when used as a section heading or as the title of a directory category.
• Directory, Predictions Log,Corrections Log, Glossary — capitalize when referring to the standing pages of this publication; lowercase when used generically.

How we refer to people

On first reference, we use full name and (where relevant) title. On subsequent reference, we use the surname alone. We do not use honorifics in body text. We do not use middle initials unless the subject does. We do not use age in body text unless the piece is about the person’s age.

How we refer to companies

We use the company’s own canonical spelling. We do not refer to a company as “they” when the antecedent could be the founder; we name whichever we mean.

Dates and datelines

The Bulletin uses ISO-style dates in metadata and structured data (2026-04-08) and the long form in body (April 8, 2026). We do not use ordinals (“April 8th”). We do not use all-caps month names. Quarter references use the form Q2 2026.

The Bulletin does not date pieces with a dateline at the top of the body. Date appears in the meta strip under the headline. The reason is structural: a thesis publication’s pieces survive the news cycle, and the dateline form is a news convention we have deliberately not adopted.

Citations

Citations to the Bulletin’s own pieces use the form title, byline, year: “Aksoy, ‘What Is Web4? A Working Definition’, 2026.”. When linking, we use the canonical article URL. Outside publications citing the Bulletin are asked to use the byline-year-URL form on the Press page.

The Bulletin does not use footnote-style citation in the body. Inline links are the working convention. Where a piece relies on a non-public document, the writer holds the source and the piece names it (“a draft of the company’s Q2 board memo”).

Quoting

Quoted material is set in double curly quotes. We do not silently edit quotes for length without a marker; ellipses are used to indicate elision. We do not edit quotes for grammar; if a quoted sentence contains a colloquialism, it stays.

Pull quotes — quotes lifted out for layout — are set in Roboto Slab and bracketed with a hairline rule above and below. Pull quotes carry the original speaker’s name beneath. The Bulletin does not use unsourced pull quotes.

Links

Outbound links go only to canonical destinations. The Bulletin does not link out to subscriber funnels, sales pages, or fundraising material for any company in the directory.

Internal links go to the canonical slug. We do not link to paginated archive listings; pieces are linked at their article URL. The Bulletin’s archive is a navigational artifact, not a citation target.

Formats

The Bulletin’s working formats are: Cornerstone Essay, Essay, Comparative Essay, Opinion, Profile, Case Study, Field Guide, Architecture, Reading List, Regional, and Speculative. Format names are capitalized in metadata and in the meta strip; in body, they are lowercase (“a comparative essay”, “the Bulletin’s reading list”).

The forbidden vocabulary

The phrasings the Bulletin avoids in our own voice are: the first, the only, the #1, world’s best. We may quote an outside source using these phrasings when the quote is the point; we paraphrase around them otherwise. Where the field is genuinely sparse and a piece needs to indicate primacy, the working phrasings are pioneering, one of the first, the earliest of the directory entries to ship, and the cleanest available example.

Numbers and units

Numbers under ten are spelled out in body; ten and above are numerals (“three contributors”, “14 essays”). Currency uses the symbol-first form (“$2M”, “$500k”); M and k are lowercase except at the start of a sentence. Percentages use the digit form (“a third”, never “33%”, in body; numeric form is acceptable in tables and structured data).

Headings

Headlines use sentence case. We do not use title case. We do not end headlines with a period unless the headline is a complete sentence in which the period’s absence would be ungrammatical. Subheads inside a piece are bolded and short; they exist for navigation, not for rhetoric.

What this guide does not cover

This guide is not a comprehensive style reference. It documents the decisions where contributors have, in practice, needed to converge. For matters not covered here, the working default is the Chicago Manual of Style. For matters where Chicago conflicts with the Bulletin’s voice (the forbidden vocabulary, the no-dateline rule, the sentence-case headlines), this guide governs.

Substantive changes to this guide are dated in the corrections log.