Neural Noise

Style Guide

2 min read

Internal reference for maintaining consistent voice and quality across all content types.

Voice

Neural Noise uses a concise, editorial voice grounded in primary sources. The tone is confident but measured — factual rather than hype-driven, precise rather than exhaustive.

  • Prefer active voice. “Researchers demonstrated…” not “It was demonstrated by researchers…”
  • Lead with what matters. State the key finding or development first, then context.
  • Attribute clearly. Name the lab, company, or journal. Don’t say “a recent study” when you can say “a Nature Neuroscience paper from Chang Lab.”
  • Avoid jargon inflation. Use the simplest accurate term. “EEG-based BCI” not “non-invasive electroencephalographic brain-computer interfacing system.”

Content types

Weekly briefs

Each item should be a self-contained editorial summary a reader can scan in 10 seconds:

  1. Headline links to the source.
  2. Source attribution (journal or outlet name).
  3. Lead sentence — one sentence stating what happened and why it matters for BCI/neurotechnology.
  4. Collapsible RSS summary — raw feed content for reference.

Do not include:

  • Internal triage scores, tier labels, or scoring rationale
  • Raw pipeline statistics (e.g., “Included: 20, Scored: 155”)
  • Keyword false-positive commentary (e.g., “BCI Seguros is a tennis sponsor”)
  • Unresolved Google News redirect URLs — always resolve to the canonical source

The introductory paragraph should be one short editorial sentence (e.g., “This week’s brief highlights N items from across the field.”).

Topic notes

Topic notes are evergreen reference pages. Each published topic should meet a minimum quality bar:

  • At least one paragraph of synthesis (not just a bullet point)
  • Two or more real citations (not just a single Google News RSS link)
  • A clear description in frontmatter

Stubs (notes below this bar) should remain publish: false until they are fleshed out, or be visually marked with a seedling callout:

> [!seedling] This topic is a seedling — a brief note that will grow as more sources are gathered.
>

Directory pages (People, Companies, Timeline)

These are the site’s strongest pages. Maintain the editorial annotations that make them more than database dumps — contextual notes about coverage history, funding stage, and significance.

Frontmatter

Internal-only fields (triage_backend, triage_model, generator, scored, included) should never appear in reader-facing copy. They are metadata for the pipeline.

Citations

Every factual claim must link to a primary source — paper, preprint, SEC filing, or reputable reporting. Footnotes must resolve to a readable URL, not an opaque redirect (e.g., Google News RSS intermediary links).

Graph View

Backlinks