---
description: co rem 1.9.2b3: after reading every page of a real notebook, the fixes were about what a reader notices in the first ten seconds.
tags: [REM, Writing]
---

# Pages you can read straight away

Last week we read every page of a real notebook, 289 of them. Most were useful.
What stopped a reader was rarely a wrong fact. It was smaller than that.

Footnotes that ran 1, 3, 7, because the model had dropped two sources and kept
the numbers. A person's Company left Unknown while an organisation page for
their own mail domain sat one click away. The same person on two pages, once by
name and once by handle. A page that called you "you" in one paragraph and
by your own name in the next, and opened on whatever happened last Tuesday instead of
who this person is.

None of these needs a better model. Each is a rule applied when the page is
written. Sources are renumbered in order and every citation follows. An unknown
Company links the organisation page for the person's mail domain. Init ends by
naming the pages that are probably one person, with the command that merges
them. Pages refer to you one way, and the first line says who someone is.

We ran the same mailbox again. Gaps in source numbering went from 40 pages to
none. Company Unknown went from 53 people to 31. Pages that named you instead
of saying "you" went from 58 to 1. The run took 122 minutes and $8.42, and left
3 pages unwritten instead of 8.

Two of those three had left out a required section, so validation refused the
whole page. That was the wrong trade: a page with one section marked Unknown is
more use than no page. Now the section is added as Unknown and the page is
kept. The third page cited files from outside its own material. That refusal
was right, and it stays.