The Descriptivist Manifesto
summary
Argues for a descriptive approach to docs by measuring actual usage and converting patterns into policy: uses Google Ngrams for collocation checks, searches a GitHub repo and a local clone with bbedit and one regex, inspects Figma copy and live captions, and finds in slot vs on slot appears roughly 20:1 ratio in favor of “in slot.” Codifies the higher-frequency choice into a style entry, preserving existing team language rather than imposing rules.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Start
- 2:53What is descriptivism?
- 15:22describe patterns, not just rules
- 16:45hardware and software
- 18:47usage in a smaller community
- 20:09micro-corpus: Figma
- 25:53The Manifesto...for documentarians
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