The voice skills decide what a piece argues. This decides how its title is built. Run it last, on the title alone, after the body is written — a headline written before the piece is a headline the piece then has to live up to.

Composes after patriot-editorial-framework (institutional CAF voice) or patriot-opinion-voice (Peter’s first-person commentary voice). It does not replace either, and it never changes what a title claims — only how it is constructed, ordered and punctuated.

1. The two title classes

PU publishes two kinds of title, and applying one class’s rules to the other is the most common failure. Decide the class first; everything else follows.

If a title has no verb and is not naming a catalogued entity, it is probably a Class A headline that lost its verb. Put the verb back.

2. Class A — headlines

2.1 One idea. This is the rule the others serve.

“It is better to convey one idea crisply and clearly rather than cram in two ideas awkwardly.” — Reuters Handbook of Journalism, Headlines

Reuters caps headlines at 50 characters after the tag. PU has no wire constraint and does not need one, but the discipline the cap enforces is the point: a headline carrying three facts carries none of them.

This is also the honest answer to “should we swap the em dash for a colon.” Usually neither. A trailing clause hung off a dash is a second idea, and repunctuating it as a colon leaves it a second idea. **Cut it, don’t repunctuate it.**

Three ideas after a dash Public Lands Are a Public Asset — Follow the Wealth Transfer

One idea, with a verb Public land sales moved wealth upward. Here is the trail. Who gained when public land was sold

2.2 Downstyle, present tense, active voice

• Sentence case. Capitalize the first word and proper nouns only. No

terminal period; a question mark is fine.

• Present tense for the immediate past, infinitive for the future:

“Court blocks the rule” / “Court to hear the challenge”.

• Active voice, not passive. Reuters: “use the active voice, not passive.”
• Short words over long, familiar over fancy, specific over abstract.

Bloomberg’s The Bloomberg Way states this as a general writing principle and it applies hardest here.

• Say where. Reuters’ example: “Central Bank cuts interest rates” — which

central bank? A headline that could be about any jurisdiction is about none.

2.3 Punctuation

2.4 Adjectives and adverbs

Strip them. A headline that needs “devastating”, “unprecedented” or “shocking” is a headline whose facts are not carrying it. This is Bloomberg discipline and it is also PU rule 2 in peter-writing-voice — avoid superlatives, absolutes and hype — reaching the title.

3. Class B — reference-entry titles

A profile title is not a headline and should not pretend to be one. It is a catalogue label: it names an entity and gives the reader just enough to know they have the right one.

Form: Name: shortest identifier that disambiguates

Jared Wise: former FBI agent pardoned for January 6 Anna Paulina Luna: U.S. representative, Florida’s 13th district Steve Doocy: Fox & Friends co-host Defending the Republic: Stop the Steal fundraising vehicle

Rules.

1. The identifier is for disambiguation, not for the résumé. One role, the

one that explains why this entity is in the knowledge base. Everything else belongs in the dek or the body — where it is searchable, correctable and dated, none of which a title is.

1. Colon, not em dash. §4.
2. A title is not an assessment. Severity, DMA/SMA/DRA scores and

characterisations stay out of the title. The instruments carry their own defamation-law framing that a title cannot reproduce, and a title travels without it — into search results, social cards and the listing widgets.

1. Sentence case after the colon, unless the identifier opens with a proper

noun.

1. No trailing “— Accountability Profile”. The category already says so, on

every surface that shows the title.

4. Why not an em dash

Two independent reasons. Either alone would be enough.

It does not render. PU’s House Style display face is Bodoni Moda, a high-contrast didone with an opsz (optical size) axis. CSS applies font-optical-sizing: auto by default, so the browser sets opsz to the rendered pixel size — and the larger the headline, the thinner the horizontal hairlines get. Measured on the shipped font file, em-dash bar height:

opsz 33 (a 33px headline) 0.0055 em -> 0.18px opsz 11 (font default) 0.0190 em -> 0.63px opsz 9 (what PU pins) 0.0258 em -> 0.85px

At 0.18px the dash has no device pixel to land in on a 1× display. It is not faint; it is absent, and readers see a blank space. font-weight does not help — the same measurement at 700, 800 and 900 returns an identical bar, because Bodoni’s weight axis thickens stems and leaves hairlines alone. The theme now pins opsz to 9 as a mitigation (chassis.css), which is 4.7× better and still not emphatic. A colon’s dot is 0.55 em and solid at every optical size.

It reads as machine-written. The clause — clause construction is one of the more reliable surface signals of LLM-generated prose, and PU publishes accountability journalism whose whole value is being believed. A punctuation habit that invites the reader to wonder whether a person wrote it costs more than it conveys.

Where em dashes are still correct: inside body prose, as asides. peter-writing-voice §Mechanics says so and stays right. That rule is about prose; this one is about titles. Both hold, because the failure mode is specific to display type and to the title’s job.

5. Checklist

Run every title against this. Any “no” is a rewrite, not a note.

Both classes

• [ ] No em dash
• [ ] No terminal period
• [ ] Single quotes if any, never double
• [ ] Numerals for numbers
• [ ] No abbreviation beyond US, UK, UN, EU and the entity’s own name
• [ ] No adjective or adverb doing persuasive work
• [ ] Nothing asserted that the body does not support and source
• [ ] Reads correctly with no context — it will appear in a listing, a search

result and a social card with nothing around it

Class A only

• [ ] Exactly one idea
• [ ] Has an active verb
• [ ] Present tense for recent events, infinitive for future
• [ ] Sentence case
• [ ] A reader can tell where and to whom this happened

Class B only

• [ ] Name: identifier
• [ ] Exactly one role in the identifier
• [ ] No score, severity or characterisation
• [ ] No trailing category echo (“— Accountability Profile”)

6. Sources

• AP Stylebook, headlines entry — single quote marks, numerals,

abbreviations, periods. Restated publicly by AP Stylebook, July 2025.

• AP Stylebook, The em dash: A valid punctuation mark —

. AP sets no limit on em dashes but cautions against overuse where commas would do.

• Reuters Handbook of Journalism, Headlines — 50-character cap, upper and

lower case, short words, active voice, present tense, no unfamiliar abbreviations, one idea, say where.

• The Bloomberg Way: A Guide for Reporters and Editors, ch. 7, Headlines;

and its general principles — “Prefer the short to the long. Prefer the familiar to the fancy. Prefer the specific word to the abstract.”

Where this skill states a rule the guides do not contain — the em-dash ban, the Class B form, the no-assessment-in-a-title rule — it is labelled a house rule and its reasoning is given. Nothing here is attributed to a guide that does not say it.