The Attribution Line Above Every Passage

Every passage opens with a line like adapted from a 2019 article in a marine biology journal, or adapted from an essay first published in 1923. That line is not decoration. It is the fastest prediction tool you get. A source type tells you the genre: a journal article is built on mechanism and evidence, defining its technical terms as it goes. A memoir is built on one person's lived experience, offered as proof in itself rather than evidence meant for you to check. A policy journal argues a position and expects pushback. Reading that line first means you already know what kind of reasoning is coming.

The date does similar work for tone and assumption. A line reading first published in 1923 warns you that the writer is speaking to a reader of 1923, not to you. An unexplained reference, a casual aside, a assumption about what's obvious: all of that belongs to the writer's own moment. You stop trying to make a 1920s reference make modern sense and instead read it as period-appropriate shorthand. A 2019 science article, by contrast, assumes a present-day reader and will usually define its jargon on the page, since it can't assume shared background the way an old essay assumes shared culture.

This sits right before the passage itself and right before the two genres and three formats of the section. Once you've read the attribution line, you walk into the text already knowing whether to expect evidence you can check or experience you can't, and whether silence on a term means it's assumed knowledge or just old news.