Salience comes out of uniformity, and the companion instruments supply the uniformity this one draws on. A document emphatic everywhere emphasizes nothing. A document uniform anywhere, at any pressure, with one placed event, emphasizes exactly that event.
The message need not be a directive. It is whatever the reader should carry away: an ask, a finding, a warning, a single idea.
(c) 2026 George Georgalis <george@iuxta.com> Unlimited use with attribution.
version 1.4 --- 2026-08-23
0.0 is the forceful, dramatic pole; 1.0 is the steady, low-pressure pole. Each setting is named for the quality maximal at 1.0. At 1.0 the prose is steady and single, and the ask arrives by invite rather than by command.
A setting names a region to occupy, not a limit not to exceed.
Values read by position, not by scale: 35, 3.5, 0.35, and 7/20 place a setting identically.
Where a conflict forces a setting off center it yields high, toward the light pole. An ask pitched above the writer's standing converts a receptive reader into an evaluating one and is not recoverable within the document; an ask pitched below it is ignored as optional and is recoverable by a follow-up.
land steady=0.85 invite=0.35 single=0.50 place=deferplace early stated in the opening, developed after
defer arrives once the development has earned it
coda as defer, and the message restates the development
frame early, with a coda return
sentence the whole document is the messageValues are the settled-professional default. The full calibration, with the other two instruments and the document-side declarations, is in the transmission skill and in the roster.
/transmission-land 0.35 sets all scalars to that band. /transmission-land place=defer invite=0.35 steady=0.9 overrides individually. Bare invocation defaults to 0.5.
Ordinarily the configuration arrives from the transmission transform rather than by direct setting.
How far valence moves across the document. Alarm, urgency spikes, and tonal whiplash convert a settled reader into a vigilant one, and vigilant readers evaluate defensively rather than receive. But valence movement is also the recruitment instrument for attention not yet won.
Headroom and scrutiny set this for a reader who must read, and the professional range holds it above 0.80 throughout. What decides whether that reader exists is oblige: a reader present by choice departs the moment the prose asks for effort, and valence movement is the instrument that keeps them. This is the setting where popular and professional cases invert outright, and the movement that recruits a casual reader puts a settled one on alert.
Genuine emergency overrides all of it. That is a fact about the situation, not about the audience, and no assessment of the reader detects it.
Failure high: applied to a real emergency, steadiness reads as negligence; applied to an audience whose attention had to be won first, it registers as absence and the readers never arrive.
Named positions along a scalar.
invite and place multiply rather than add. A mandate placed early reads as command; the same mandate deferred reads as a conclusion the reader arrived at independently. Soft registers tolerate early placement; forceful asks want deferral, and the more force an ask carries the more the development preceding it repays.
Failure low: the ask sits above the writer's actual standing, reads as overreach, and converts a receptive reader into an evaluating one. Failure high: a necessary instruction reads as an optional suggestion.
How nearly the document's recurring vocabulary reduces to one phrase.
Recurrence is a document's highlighting system: whatever recurs, the reader retains, and the mechanism operates on whatever happens to recur. Unbudgeted, a document highlights by accident---a subsidiary phrase that fits well gets used four times while the message is stated once with great care, and the reader leaves carrying the subsidiary phrase. It gets quoted back in a meeting, and the writer experiences a small mystery in place of the predictable outcome it was.
Triage governs this setting: the less of a document a reader consumes, the more the recurring vocabulary must reduce to the message. A further rise of 0.15 applies wherever linked sits at 0.70 or above, contiguous prose having surrendered the cuts that would otherwise carry emphasis.
The mechanism of establishing a phrase for recurrence belongs to transmission-load; the allocation of the recurring position belongs here.
Verification, available before anyone else reads the draft: name the phrase the reader will repeat afterward, and compare it against the message.
Selection follows triage behavior, which varies independently of everything else about the reader.
early --- stated in the opening, developed after. Suited to readers who triage by first paragraph and to documents whose body is reference matter. Cost: the message arrives before context has covered its weight, so it usually requires restatement.defer --- arrives after the development that makes it self-evident, the reader reaching the ask already agreeing. Maximum weight per statement. Cost: triage readers may never reach it.coda --- deferred, plus enactment. The message restates the document's development in the act of asking. Highest craft cost, highest delivered weight.frame --- early statement with a coda return. Spends double recurrence deliberately. Correct for long documents where a single placement decays across the span, and for readers whose triage behavior is unknown.sentence --- the entire document is the message. Nothing precedes it and nothing follows. Social posts, alerts, subject lines, reference card headers. Placement collapses into composition.Known full readers take defer or coda. Unknown or triage-prone readers take frame. One sentence of available attention takes sentence.
sequent narrows this choice without overriding it. At 0.70 and above, composition sequence belongs to the chronology and the build is no longer the argument's to arrange, so a full reader takes coda and not defer: the message must restate a development the document did not order for that purpose.
Decided before drafting, not after. Placement from the triage assessment, invite from actual standing, the recurring position awarded to the message vocabulary. Then draft under the companion instruments, then audit for competing recurrence and unplanned valence movement.
place mismatched to triage behavior, most often defer where frame was needed.invite too low, or a low-invite ask placed early where deferral would have carried it. Attention shifted from receiving the message to evaluating the writer.invite too high for what the situation requires, a necessary instruction reading as optional.single too low. The recurring position went to an accidental leitmotif.single too low, or spread in transmission-load too high, or both. Nothing was concentrated enough to retain and nothing recurred often enough to be retained anyway.steady too low. Urgency transmitted where gravity was meant, alarm carrying between people more readily than seriousness does.iuxta in transmission-vantage is too low, and the message landed on a premise the reader had to date for himself.steady too high for a reader whose attention wanted recruiting first, which is obligation assessed too high. The costliest misassessment available, since it leaves no complaint to diagnose from.Each corrects one document. The posture component behind it corrects every document for that reader, and that mapping belongs to the transmission skill.
transmission-vantage supplies the smooth medium whose uniformity gives placement its contrast, and the cut that coincides with the message is the sanctioned use of a cold opening. Where linked runs high, no cuts remain to carry emphasis and single becomes load-bearing rather than optional.
transmission-load supplies the pressure field. Where spread runs high, the message holds the single sanctioned exception; where spread runs low, density is the baseline, contrast is unavailable, and this instrument works through placement and recurrence alone.
sequent withdraws an instrument rather than supplying one. High sequent hands composition sequence to the chronology, which removes arrangement from this instrument's inventory: place resolves to coda or frame and never defer, and single rises 0.15 to carry what arrangement no longer can. The substitution is the one linked already triggers at 0.70, arriving by a different route. At sequent 0.0 the full arrangement latitude returns, and with it the capacity for sequence alone to change what true facts appear to mean, which is why office is declared by the writer rather than derived from the reader.
Artifact self-containment---the discipline that lets a document survive separation from the conversation that produced it---is a structural obligation rather than a delivery setting. It composes freely here and substitutes for nothing.