Receipt

The collapsed block near the end of every lesson in this course, headed “The receipts.” It carries the full citation for every claim in the lesson above it: author, title, publication, year, page or link, one line on what the source actually argues, and one word on whether you can reach it for free.

It exists so that the prose can stay readable without asking anyone to take anything on trust. It is also where disputed figures are laid out in full, where honest gaps are named, and where the course records what it deliberately did not claim.

If a sentence in a lesson has no receipt and no named source in the same paragraph, that is a defect, not a style choice.

Source: Course-coined, carried from the lesson anatomy in this build’s voice specification. The underlying idea, that a documentary claim should travel with its paperwork attached, comes from the course direction memo’s requirement that the course double as a research base for a film.

First used in: 0.2 · How we will know what is true