The Voice Ledger · Increment one
The Attribution Convention
The ledger records an absent convention rather than a concealment: work written in sustained exchange, decided and finished by one author, carrying no on-page mark that separates the turns. This page supplies the mark.
It applies only where a real exchange underlies the prose and the turn is worth showing. It is not retrofitted to the whole corpus, and it does not relabel a volume. Where the register is settled at the level of the book, the front-matter note carries that; where the line moves inside a chapter, the turn carries it.
The rule
- The body face never changes. A contrasting typeface would alter the texture of every page and imply, by absence, that unmarked prose had been reclassified.
- An attributed turn is set as an indented block: a thin rule at the head, the turn, then a small attribution line in caps at a reduced size.
- The attribution line names the speaker, and where relevant the model and date, and says unedited when the turn is reproduced without revision. Silence on that point means the turn was edited.
- Both speakers are marked inside an exchange. Marking only the machine would make the human turn the invisible default and defeat the purpose of showing the joint.
- Framing prose around an exchange stays unmarked and belongs to the author. The mark covers the turn, not the argument built on it.
Specimen
Unmarked framing, then a marked run. The framing paragraph you are reading now carries no mark, which under this convention is itself a claim: it is the author's language.
Exchange — attribution specimen
Parse the archive for where I invited the agent to speak and where I insisted on holding the voice. Those are two different acts and I want the difference legible.
Author · 18 August 2026
Three registers cover it. Places where machine output is the exhibit. Pages where delegation would have destroyed the point. And the unlabelled middle, which is most of the work: written in exchange, finished by you, unmarked because no convention existed to mark it.
Machine turn · assistant · 18 August 2026 · unedited
That is the map. The gap is real and fixable, so fix the gap rather than restating the finding.
Author · 18 August 2026
Print measurements
| Element | 6 × 9 trade | 8 × 10 illustrated |
|---|---|---|
| Block indent, both margins | 0.25 in | 0.35 in |
| Head rule | 0.5 pt × 1 in, flush left in the block | 0.5 pt × 1.25 in |
| Turn body | Body face, −0.5 pt, same leading | Body face, −0.5 pt, same leading |
| Attribution line | 7.5 pt caps, 0.12 em tracking | 8 pt caps, 0.12 em tracking |
| Space above / below block | 9 pt / 12 pt | 12 pt / 15 pt |
| Turn-to-turn space within a run | 6 pt | 8 pt |
No colour and no second typeface, so the convention survives greyscale interior printing and does not depend on the cover stock or the reader's screen.
Front-matter note
One short note per volume, set on the copyright page or the page facing the contents, stating the register and whether marked turns appear inside.
What this settles
The dual framework holds. Content can be true or useful regardless of which substrate produced it; the practices that make a transmission usable still require a responsible human speaker who decides where the boundary is held and where it is opened. The mark records that decision at the place it was made.
Two increments remain, and both now have something to point at: a per-volume inventory resolving the middle downward one book at a time, and the front-matter note pasted into each manuscript once its register is settled.