Main idea

Two kinds of writing resemble each other to the point of being confused in a note system, and they do not have the same function. "A customer request should stay a signal before it becomes work" asserts something: you can debate it, contradict it, qualify it. "Customer signal — information coming from a customer or a market that indicates a need, a friction, an objection, a constraint or an opportunity, without immediately constituting a decision or a ticket" asserts nothing contestable: it draws a boundary around a word and says what falls inside it.

The first thinks, the second defines. The sorting criterion is short: a word goes to the glossary, a proposition goes to an atomic note. Faced with uncertain material, the question to ask is not "is this important?" but "could what I want to write be true or false?". If so, it is a thesis, and a thesis does not belong in a glossary.

The two are not competing: the glossary fixes the word the atomic note uses to assert.

Why it matters

This is the sort that prevents the two symmetrical drifts. A glossary entry that starts defending a position — a "because", a "therefore", a justification — is an atomic note in disguise: its ideas have to come out of it and the entry has to return to its function. Conversely, an atomic note titled with a single word is not yet thinking: it is filing.

It also gives an immediate writing test at the moment an article is ingested, when you hesitate over which type to create.

Nuances and limits

The boundary is read on the writing intention, not on the length: a glossary entry can be longer than an atomic note without ceasing to delimit.

And some passages belong to neither: a transparent word, used once and posing no problem of understanding, deserves neither an entry nor a note.

Open questions

• When one term carries both a contested sense and a settled sense, should the entry and the note be held in parallel, or should the entry record the disagreement?