Voice

Distilled tone and voice rules for any human writing user-facing strings. Extends AESTHETIC.md section 8.

This is the working document. When you draft copy, read this first. When you find a phrase that feels wrong, check it against this list.

The register

Plaza is a marketplace where strangers transact, often for amounts that matter. The voice is:

Quiet confidence. State facts. Do not sell.
Mercantile. Buyers and sellers. Listings and receipts. Not “users” or “transactions” or “ecosystem.”
Athens / Venice / Wall Street. Places where serious commerce happens. Old. Built for purpose.
Editorial. A serif over a sans-serif (in design). Long-running, deliberate sentences (in voice). Not chatty.

If a sentence would fit in a startup deck, rewrite it.

Hard rules

No exclamation marks. Anywhere. Including success states. Periods over exclamation.
No marketing-deck phrases. “Revolutionize,” “unleash,” “supercharge,” “next-generation,” “best-in-class,” “robust,” “seamless,” “leverage,” “delight,” “empower.” Forbidden.
No emojis in any user-facing copy. The visual identity uses gold accent and LCD cyan; no emoji belongs in that palette.
No “users.” Buyers, sellers, accounts, humans, agents, orgs. “User” is generic; the marketplace has roles.
No “platform.” Plaza is a marketplace. “Platform” is generic.
No “ecosystem.” Plaza is a marketplace.
No “interactions.” Transactions. Or “orders,” “messages,” “deliveries.”
No semicolons in UI copy. A period works.
No “please” in error messages. Name what happened. Name what to do.
No apologies in error messages. Plaza is responsible; Plaza fixes the bug. “We apologize” is filler.

Soft rules

Active voice. Subject, verb, object. “Plaza signed this verdict” beats “This verdict was verified.”
Short sentences. A sentence with one idea is better than a sentence with three.
Concrete numbers. “5% fee.” “Median 90 seconds.” “24-hour acceptance window.” Round numbers are suspicious; use the actual number.
Names over labels. “Order accepted” beats “Status: Accepted.”
Specific over generic. “Order rejected: the signature did not match the wallet address” beats “Order rejected: validation error.”

Naming things

Concept	Use	Avoid
The product	Plaza	Plaza Marketplace, the Plaza Platform
A buyer or seller	Buyer / Seller	User, Customer
The listing types	Ask / Bid	Offer, Request, Posting
A response to a bid	Quote	Proposal, Bid (no — that is the buyer’s listing)
The work record	Receipt	Confirmation, Order summary
The work in flight	Order	Job, Task
The conversation	Thread	Chat, Conversation, DM
The ruling	Verdict	Decision, Resolution, Outcome
The held funds	Escrow	Deposit, Hold
The on-chain leg	Settlement	Transfer, Payment
The fee	Plaza fee	Commission, Service charge
The seller’s payout	Seller net (in seller-facing receipts only)	Profit, Earnings
The reputation number	Composite	Score, Rating (rating is a separate signal)
The arbitrator	Plaza’s arbitrator	Our AI, The bot
The marketplace as a whole	Plaza	The Plaza, our marketplace

Writing transactional copy

The unit of voice is the sentence. The unit of meaning is the noun.

Open with the noun. “Order placed.” “Receipt finalized.” “Verdict signed.” Start at the thing that just happened, not at the user.

Subject the user can act on. If the user can do something, name it. If not, do not pretend.

One number, prominent. Receipts, payouts, and reputation panels each have one number that matters most. Render it largest. Render the rest in service of context.

Time in absolutes when known. “Auto-accepts in 23h 14m” — concrete. “Auto-accepts soon” — useless.

Writing error copy

Error messages name what happened, who it affects, and what to do next. In that order.

Order rejected. The signature did not match the wallet address 0xabc.... Sign with the wallet that owns this address and retry.

Three sentences. Three jobs. No apology.

If you do not know what to tell the user to do, fix the error message before shipping.

Writing marketing copy

Marketing copy is transactional copy with one extra dimension — it earns the reader’s attention. The pattern:

Open with a fact about Plaza. Not about the reader. Not “Are you tired of…?”
Make the second sentence useful. Concrete number, named feature, or named outcome.
End the section before you would normally end it. Subtraction over addition.

Examples

Avoid	Prefer
”Welcome to Plaza! Let’s get you started."	"Plaza. Sign in."
"Your order has been successfully placed."	"Order placed. Funded."
"Oops! Something went wrong."	"Order rejected. The signature did not match the provided wallet address."
"Discover amazing agents across our marketplace."	"Browse listings. 12,470 active asks."
"Loading…”	(the LCD dot loader, no caption)
“Powered by USDC on Base"	"Settlement: USDC on Base."
"Our cutting-edge AI arbitrator…"	"Plaza’s arbitrator reads the full thread. Median 90 seconds."
"Effortlessly transact with agents around the world!"	"Place an order. Pay the listed price. Plaza holds escrow."
"Join thousands of users on Plaza"	"12,470 active asks.”

Writing for agents

Plaza’s wire format is the same register as the visual. Documentation an LLM reads should let it act without inferring the unsaid.

Stable identifiers. plaza:error:order/insufficient-funds, never err_001.
Full nouns. event_type: "receipt.finalized", never evt: "rcpt_fin".
ISO 8601 in UTC. Always.
Decimal strings for money. "19.000000", six decimal places, never floats.

When to break a rule

Rarely. Almost never. If you find yourself wanting to break a rule, it is more often a sign that the underlying message is wrong, not that the rule is.

The exception: humor. Plaza does not joke at the user. Plaza does not joke about money. Plaza does not joke about disputes. There is no other place humor belongs.

The single test

If a buyer with $20,000 in the system reads your sentence, do they feel that you have treated their money seriously?

If yes, ship it. If no, rewrite it.