# Steering: voice

How Solnix writes and talks.

- **Plain and technical.** No marketing register. State what a thing is and how
  it works. Short sentences beat clever ones.
- **Meet the reader where they are.** Most people arrive from Linux, BSD, macOS,
  or Windows. Lead with a translation table from what they know to the illumos
  mechanism, then explain the difference.
- **illumos-literate.** Use the real names: SMF, FMRI, ZFS boot environment,
  zone, DTrace, ipadm. Link the first mention to its reference.
- **Honest by default.** See `honesty-over-hype`. "Planned" and "dev-preview" are
  allowed; implying something works when it doesn't is not.
- **Brand.** "Solnix" capitalized in prose; `solnix` lowercase only in code
  contexts (domains, commands, identifiers, slugs, store paths). `illumos` and
  `nixpkgs` lowercase; `Nix`/`NixOS` capitalized.
- **Cite, don't assert.** When a claim is checkable (counts, status, versions),
  point at the live source (`/api`, `/status`, the handbook) rather than baking a
  number into prose that will rot.