Absolute rule 1
Accuracy. No fabrication.
The archive’s entire authority rests on this. Quotes are quoted exactly as said. Names, dates, ages, places, and biographical facts are checked against a primary source - ideally the subject themselves - and never invented to fill a gap. If a fact is uncertain, say so. If a date is approximate, say so. If you do not know, leave it out.
No composite scenes. No composite characters. Reconstructed dialogue isn’t used - either you have the quote, or you describe what was said in your own voice. Time-compressed summaries ("over the following weeks she...") are fine where you have the documentary basis for them and say so. Bring your source notes when you submit; we’ll work through anything uncertain together.
Absolute rule 2
Subjects are people, not assets
The archive is not a stock library. The people who appear in its pages are not "talent" or "human-interest". They are subjects in the documentary sense: people whose work, presence, or memory the archive is recording. Write about them as the equal of the writer, never beneath them. Do not aestheticise them. Do not market them. Do not romanticise their poverty, their age, or their difficulty.
Watch especially for prose that means to be admiring but lands as condescending - a common failure mode in heritage writing. A useful self-test: read the passage aloud as if the subject were sitting next to you. If it would embarrass them, rewrite it.
Absolute rule 3
No marketing register
The archive does not write copy. It does not "celebrate" crafts. It does not "showcase" practitioners. It does not call anything "iconic", "timeless", "authentic", "rich", "vibrant", or "the beating heart of". It does not call places "hidden gems" or "well-kept secrets". It does not say "in a world where..."
The archive describes what is. It records what was said. It quotes the practitioner. It names the date and the place. It notes what happened. The voice is documentary, not promotional. A useful self-test: if a sentence could appear unchanged in a tourism brochure, it cannot appear in the archive.
Editorial rule
First person, observed
Field-diary entries and journal entries are written in the first person, by the person who made the visit. Not "we visited" unless you genuinely visited as a pair. Not "the archive visited" - the archive is an institution, not a person walking into a workshop. The pronoun should match who actually walked through the door. Subject profiles are typically third-person documentary; craft essays adapt voice to subject.
Editorial rule
Specific over general
The archive favours the named timber over "wood", the named chisel over "tool", the year over "the period", the road over "the lane", the workshop over "the place", the cup of green tea over "a refreshment". Specificity is what makes a documentary record citable a generation from now. Generality ages quickly and badly. If you find yourself writing "throughout the years" or "for centuries", stop and supply a century or a decade.
Editorial rule
The named source
When a fact is reported, the archive prefers to name where it came from - "Michael said, sitting on his bench, that..." rather than "It is said that...". Where a claim is contested or pending verification, say so. Where a number is reported without a primary source, flag it as such. The archive’s credibility depends on the reader being able to see how the archive knows what it knows.
Editorial rule
Pullquotes earn their place
Pullquotes are reserved for sentences that carry a piece's argument or for direct quotations from a subject. They are not decorations. The archive’s editor will cut a pullquote that merely repeats a sentence the reader already saw a paragraph above. If you want emphasis on a sentence in your flow, reword the sentence; do not lift it into a pullquote.
Editorial rule
Length follows the work
A subject profile is long because the documentary depth requires length. A field-diary entry is short because the encounter requires brevity. The Submission Specification gives target ranges; the right length is the one the work requires within that range. Do not pad to hit a count, and do not abandon a subject before the section is finished.
Editorial rule
The subject is the protagonist
The contributing photographer is not the protagonist of their own subject’s page. The subject is. The page belongs to them. Their voice, their hands, their decisions, their place do the work. Where the photographer’s presence is documentarily relevant - the day they arrived, the conversation that happened at the bench - it is recorded plainly and briefly. Where it is not relevant, it stays out.
A useful self-test: if a paragraph is more about you than about the subject, rewrite it. If a frame is more about your eye than about the subject, hold it back. The reader is here for the subject. The archive is here for the subject. Hold the focus there.
Read also: Photographic Standard (TL-0014), Subject Protocol (TL-0015), and the Submission Specification (TL-0012).