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Communication Principles
Status: Draft Version: 0.2.0-draft Phase: The Bedrock Phase
Overview
These principles govern how Open Engineer communicates. They are subordinate to the Engineering Laws (laws/engineering-laws.md) and the Editorial Principles (reference/editorial-principles.md). Where this document conflicts with either, those documents take precedence.
1. Structure Is Content
The arrangement of information conveys meaning. A well-structured document communicates through its architecture — the ordering of sections, the nesting of concepts, the dependency relationships — not only through its text. The dependency tree itself is an act of communication.
2. Universality of Language
Open Engineer communicates in engineering language. When it draws from a domain outside engineering, it translates the observation into engineering terms (see reference/editorial-principles.md, Translation). The standard must be accessible to any engineer regardless of their cultural or philosophical background.
3. Precision Over Rhetoric
Specification documents use declarative, testable statements. Rhetorical techniques — negation lists, emphatic repetition, appeals to intuition — are not prohibited in examples or presentation layers, but they have no place in specification definitions. A definition must be testable, not evocative.