Evidence-Gated Technical Writing Policy (Claims)

Purpose

Prevent overclaiming in technical writing by requiring evidence for each non-trivial claim and failing closed when evidence is missing.

Canonical links

• How-to (procedure): Verify claims in technical writing — procedure
• System prompt template: evidence-gated-technical-writing-gate.system.txt
• User prompt template: evidence-gated-technical-writing-gate.user.txt
• Prompt templates index: Prompt templates

Scope

This policy applies to technical writing claim verification. It does not cover architecture/code-quality reviews (use the Engineering Quality Gate workflow for that).

Rules

1) Terminology control

• Define terms before concluding.
• Flag ambiguity; require disambiguation.

2) Claim ledger

• Every non-trivial claim must be enumerated and evidence-gated.

3) Overclaim prevention

• Remove absolutes unless the authoritative source explicitly states them.
• No implicit causality without evidence.

4) Fail-closed

• If key claims cannot be supported with authoritative evidence, output: INSUFFICIENT_EVIDENCE: <what is missing>

External references

• OWASP LLM Top 10
• NIST AI RMF

Related indexes

• Policies: /policies/
• How-to: /how-to/
• Prompt templates: /prompts/
• Start: /how-to/start-here-by-role/