Style notes for Lawrence’s writing

Style notes for Lawrence’s writing

When drafting or editing prose for this site (blog posts, about pages, etc.), follow these preferences:

Punctuation

  • Prefer semicolons over em-dashes when joining two complete clauses.
  • Use em-dashes only to surround incomplete clauses or parentheticals (e.g., “the whole performance — scratch work and all — becomes more likely”).
  • Prefer semicolons over colons. They are mostly interchangeable, but lean semicolon.

Voice and tone

  • Grounded, intuitive, real; easy-to-understand language.
  • Avoid on-the-nose phrasings; prefer concrete, plain wording.
  • Comfortable with rhetorical questions, asides, and a slightly playful register.
  • See aboutme.md for a sample of Lawrence’s natural writing style — flowing, comma-heavy sentences; rhetorical questions; parentheses for parentheticals; sparse use of em-dashes and colons.

Blog posts specifically

  • For the RL post (_posts/2025-12-26-JAN.md), the organizing lens is credit assignment (à la Karpathy’s “Pong from Pixels”), not the standard MDP/Bellman textbook framing.
  • Variance reduction is a theme but a secondary one; touch on it without making it central.

Resume / Overleaf sync

The resume (resume/resume.tex) syncs with an Overleaf project over git via a separate clone (default ~/Projects/overleaf-resume, where the file is main.tex).

  • make push sends local resume.tex up to Overleaf; make pull brings Overleaf down.
  • These overwrite the whole file in one direction — there is no line-level merge. Edit in one place at a time, sync, then switch, to avoid divergence.
  • See resume/README.md for full setup.