🗂 Synthetic dossier files, one pair per genre¶
Status: illustrations. Written 2026-09-15.
Written for an author filling in a dossier for the first time and
wanting to see a finished one for their genre. Each subdirectory holds
the two files you write by hand -- scope.md and outline.md --
filled in the way that genre wants them.
These are hand-written illustrations, not pipeline output. That is
the difference between this directory and
../sample-project/, where every file is a real
artefact of a real run over the five committed sample papers. Nothing
here was produced by a corpus sync or a genre skill; the citekeys in
the queries: blocks are search terms, not citekeys, and no citekey
appears in these files at all. Treat them as shapes to copy, not as
evidence of anything.
The other six files in a dossier -- evidence.md, rejected.md,
sections.md, retrieval.md, steering.md, revisions.md -- are
written for you as the draft is produced, so they are not here. See
../sample-project/content/dossiers/
for real ones.
| Genre | Files | The tutorial that walks through it |
|---|---|---|
| Survey | survey/scope.md, survey/outline.md |
WRITE-A-SURVEY.md |
| Thesis chapter | thesis-chapter/scope.md, thesis-chapter/outline.md |
WRITE-A-THESIS-CHAPTER.md |
| Textbook chapter | textbook-chapter/scope.md, textbook-chapter/outline.md |
WRITE-A-TEXTBOOK-CHAPTER.md |
| Tutorial | tutorial/scope.md, tutorial/outline.md |
WRITE-A-TUTORIAL.md |
| Deep research | deep-research/scope.md, deep-research/outline.md |
WRITE-A-DEEP-RESEARCH-REPORT.md |
| Book (a different file: the outline the book track signs) | book/spec.md |
WRITE-A-BOOK.md |
A book's spec.md is not a dossier file at all -- it lives under
content/specs/ and describes the whole book's structure, while each of
its chapters still gets its own scope.md and outline.md from the list
above. It is kept here because it is the other file an author writes by
hand before any prose exists.
🧾 The fields, once¶
scope.md is created by dossier init with every heading present
and empty. You fill in four of them, plus one line:
| Field | What goes in it | Why it is asked for |
|---|---|---|
language: |
a BCP-47 tag -- en-GB, en-US, en-IN |
ships unset; a draft whose dialect nobody chose silently gets the model's own. Set it with dossier set-language, or edit the line |
## Reader |
one concrete sentence: who this is for and what they already know | every later revision is judged against it |
## Covers |
what the draft will address | the positive half of scope |
## Does not cover |
what it deliberately will not, including any sub-theme the corpus turned out too thin to support | so a reader can tell an omission from an oversight |
## Glossary |
each recurring term with the one definition the whole draft uses | this is what stops terminology drifting between revisions |
The genre:, draft:, created: and corpus: lines are stamped by
init; draft digest: is filled by dossier stamp once the draft is
ready.
outline.md is opt-in (dossier init --outline). Per ##-or-deeper
heading:
| Field | What goes in it | How it is used |
|---|---|---|
brief: |
steering, in your words | consumed once, never appears in the draft |
claim: |
your own prose, a sentence or short block | rewritten and grounded -- every sentence that cannot be grounded in the corpus is reported rather than shipped |
queries: |
a - list of search terms |
run verbatim instead of the skill inventing sub-themes |
A section needs at least a brief: or a claim:. queries: is optional
even then -- plenty of sections are framing prose with nothing to
retrieve. A level-1 (#) line is the file's own title and is passed
over.
Validate the shape before drafting:
1 | |
It exits 1 if a section has neither a brief: nor a claim:.