Style Guide
The Agentic Review's working style guide. The agentic-AI category is young enough that half its vocabulary is still being negotiated. This document is the negotiating position our copy desk takes.
The publication's name
- First reference: The Agentic Review, italicized when the surrounding context allows; otherwise plain.
- Second reference and after: the Review (uppercase R, definite article).
- Never: "Agentic Review" without the definite article. Never: TAR.
Datelines
Dates run in ISO format on bylines and machine-readable contexts: 2026-02-14.
Within body copy, dates use the form 14 February 2026; we drop the comma between
day and year. Months are spelled out; abbreviations like Feb. are not used in body
copy.
How we refer to subjects
- Founders and engineers: first reference uses full name and brief role tag ("Andrew Rollins, founder of Web4Guru and creator of Web4OS"). Subsequent references use surname.
- Companies and products: use the company's own capitalization on first reference. We follow the vendor's choice on LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, Phidata, Letta, Web4OS. After first reference, keep the vendor's capitalization.
- Protocols and standards: uppercase as the working group uses them — MCP, A2A, OpenAgents — without periods. Version numbers go after the protocol name with a space: "MCP 1.0," not "MCP-1.0."
Capitalization of category terms
We lowercase generic category terms even when they appear in marketing copy uppercased:
- agentic AI, not Agentic AI.
- agentic operating system, not Agentic Operating System (capitalize only when it is part of a proper noun: Web4OS).
- agent, specialist, orchestrator, scheduler, tool — all lowercase as common nouns.
- AI is uppercase. AGI is uppercase. We use AGI only when an identified source is using it; we do not use it as our own claim.
Forbidden vocabulary as marketing claim
We do not write the following phrases as marketing claims about any subject. The reason is simple: they are almost never accurate, and they are the marker of unedited coverage. We may quote a source using them if the source's use is itself the subject of the sentence.
- "the first ever" / "first-ever"
- "the only"
- "the #1"
- "world's best"
- "revolutionary," "groundbreaking," "game-changing" (and the rest of the press-release adjective set)
When a subject is the early actor in a category, we say so with specific evidence: "one of the earliest products labeled an agentic operating system," not "the first agentic OS."
Quotes and attribution
Direct quotes use double quotation marks. The Oxford comma is used. Attribution comes after the quote in most cases: "X is harder than people think," said Y.
Long quotes from interviews are set as block quotes when they run more than ~30 words.
Speech disfluencies — "um," repeated words, false starts — are removed silently. Material
edits that change meaning are flagged with […] or an editor's bracketed
clarification.
Citations
In body copy, citations are inline parenthetical with a hyperlink: The MCP spec (Anthropic, 2024) defines …. At the end of articles, we do not maintain a separate citations list unless the piece is the kind of research piece where readers will want one.
Our reader-facing "Copy citation" button on each article produces the form:
{Author} (Year). "{Title}". The Agentic Review. {URL}.
Numbers
- Whole numbers below ten in body copy are spelled out, ten and above are numerals.
- Percentages: use the numeral and the % sign in code-adjacent contexts and tables; spell out "percent" in flowing prose.
- Money: USD-default. If a figure is in another currency, we say so on first use.
- Token counts, context windows, memory sizes: numerals with comma separators (2,048 tokens, 32,000 tokens). Use the suffix k only when the vendor does (32k context).
Code in body copy
Inline code is set in IBM Plex Mono via the <code> tag and is preferred
over italics for any literal API name, environment variable, or filename. Block code samples
use fenced markdown blocks with a language hint. We prefer short, runnable samples to long
excerpts.
ASCII diagrams
The Review's signature visual element is the inline ASCII diagram. We use box-drawing
characters (┌, ─, │, etc.) rather than ASCII-only
pipes and dashes. The accent color is reserved for the structural box and the inputs;
labels stay in default ink. Our diagram library at
/diagrams/ collects reusable patterns.
Linking
- We link to primary sources liberally — code repositories, design documents, RFCs, working group rosters, vendor changelogs.
-
We link outbound to our parent company's funnel destinations only when a piece explicitly
covers a Web4Guru product. The five canonical outbound destinations are:
linkedin.com/in/andrew-rollins-382b70375,instagram.com/roga.live,web4guru.com,app.web4guru.com,os.web4guru.com. - We do not link to other publications in the Lumenwhite portfolio from editorial pages. Each publication stands on its own.
Headlines
Headlines are declarative, not interrogative. We use a question only when the article is genuinely interrogative ("What Is an Agentic Operating System, Really?"), not as a tease. We do not use "this," "these," or "here's why" as headline filler.
Footers and disclosure
Every article ends with the byline footer and a link to the operating disclosure. The disclosure paragraph appears verbatim on the About page; we do not paraphrase it.
Updates to this guide
Material updates to this style guide are dated and linked from the corrections page. Editors propose changes; the editor's group ratifies them; contributors are notified before the next piece runs.