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docs: rewrite first-person voice to comply with second-person style guide#585

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Jul 6, 2026
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docs: rewrite first-person voice to comply with second-person style guide#585
tomarra merged 18 commits into
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docs/second-person-voice

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@tomarra tomarra commented Jul 2, 2026

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Summary

  • Rewrites first-person prose (we/our/us/I/let's) across ~40 docs pages into second-person or neutral third-person voice, per the Shorebird.SecondPerson style guideline.
  • Company/system self-descriptions (e.g. security.mdx, system-architecture.mdx) are rewritten in third-person/passive voice, since second-person would misstate facts about who does what.
  • Tutorial narrator voice ("we'll", "let's") is rewritten in the imperative mood, consistent with existing heading conventions.
  • Headings and list items are left untouched, since Shorebird.SecondPerson only scopes to paragraph text.

A handful of Shorebird.SecondPerson matches remain and are intentional false positives from the pattern-matching rule, not first-person prose:

  • security.mdx — URL slug #can-i-use-shorebird-in-my-country
  • system-architecture.mdx — "US" (United States), matched as the pronoun "us"
  • faq.mdx — link text [How We Bill] quoting an actual page heading
  • hybrid-apps/ios.mdx, hybrid-apps/android.mdx, release.mdx, security.mdx — "i.e." matched as the pronoun "i"
  • account/orgs.mdx — the literal default org name "My Organization"

Test plan

  • npm run build succeeds with no broken links
  • vale (with the not-yet-merged tooling from docs: add style checks for headings and content guidelines #576) shows 0 real Shorebird.SecondPerson findings across src/content/docs (only the documented false positives above remain)
  • prettier --check and cspell pass on every changed file

tomarra added 13 commits July 2, 2026 14:51
…ages

Per the marketing content guidelines, docs should be written in second
person. Rewrites the three largest offenders (230 of 487 total
first-person pronoun instances):

- system/security.mdx (139 instances): a security/policy page, almost
  entirely first-person statements about what Shorebird as a company
  does ("we use Google Cloud", "we do not sell your data"). These
  can't become "you" statements without changing the facts, so they're
  rephrased to third person ("Shorebird uses...") or passive voice
  instead.
- code-push/system-architecture.mdx (48 instances): similar pattern -
  describes Shorebird's own internal architecture and fork history
  ("we forked Flutter", "our database"), rephrased the same way.
- code-push/faq.mdx (43 instances): a mix of company statements
  (rephrased to third person/passive) and instructional recommendations
  ("we recommend X" -> "X is recommended" or dropped the pronoun
  entirely where the sentence reads fine without it).

Left headings untouched even where they contain "we" (e.g. "What
can't we use Shorebird Code Push for?") since Shorebird.SecondPerson
is scoped to paragraphs only, not headings - these were never flagged
and don't need to change.

This is a partial pass; the remaining ~40 files with first-person
instances will follow in subsequent commits.
…ols, fastlane, symbols, release, rollback, update-strategies, architecture-trees, and flutter-version guides

@AbhishekDoshi26 AbhishekDoshi26 left a comment

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Comment thread src/content/docs/account/billing.mdx Outdated
@tomarra tomarra requested a review from dawn-ducky July 3, 2026 15:53
Comment thread src/content/docs/account/billing.mdx Outdated
Comment thread src/content/docs/code-push/guides/testing-patches.mdx Outdated
tomarra added 5 commits July 6, 2026 13:52
Per review feedback, 'we never know anything about your users' reads as a
stronger, more direct privacy commitment than the passive third-person
phrasing.
@tomarra tomarra merged commit 2317d44 into main Jul 6, 2026
3 checks passed
@tomarra tomarra deleted the docs/second-person-voice branch July 6, 2026 19:00
tomarra added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 6, 2026
Now that PR #585 rewrote all real first-person prose, the only remaining
SecondPerson matches are permanent false positives (i.e., a URL slug, 'US'
as a country, the default org name, a quoted heading, and one deliberate
first-person privacy pledge). Mask those via TokenIgnores and promote the
rule to error severity so it actually blocks CI going forward, matching
Shorebird.Headings and Shorebird.Exclamation.

Vale.Terms stays at warning severity - its code-fence/URL exclusion bug is
unrelated and still unresolved.
tomarra added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 7, 2026
* docs: add Vale-based heading sentence-case style check

Adds a Shorebird.Headings Vale rule that flags Title Case headings and
suggests sentence case, with an exceptions list for brand names,
products, and acronyms. Wires it into CI as a PR-diff-scoped,
non-blocking check (via errata-ai/vale-action) since most existing
headings predate this rule and haven't been migrated yet. Run
`npm run lint:style` locally to check docs content.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* docs: check every heading in CI instead of only PR-changed lines

Switches the Vale style-check job to filter_mode: nofilter so it
reports every heading violation on each PR, not just newly touched
ones. Still non-blocking (fail_on_error: false) since this surfaces
the full existing backlog of Title Case headings.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* docs: codify marketing content guidelines into style checks

Adds Vale-based checks for three more of the marketing team's content
guidelines, alongside the existing heading sentence-case rule:

- Vale.Terms (via a Shorebird Vocab) enforces exact capitalization of
  "Shorebird", "Flutter", and "Code Push" anywhere in prose, not just
  headings.
- Shorebird.Exclamation flags exclamation points in prose, ignoring
  code spans/blocks and markdown image syntax.
- Shorebird.SecondPerson heuristically flags first-person pronouns
  (I/we/our/us) in body paragraphs. Scoped to paragraphs rather than
  headings so it doesn't flag the site's many FAQ-style "Can I...?"
  headings, which are an intentional convention.

Also adds scripts/lint-component-labels.mjs, since Vale (a markdown
prose linter) can't see MDX/JSX attributes or isolate component
boundaries: it checks <TabItem label="..."> for sentence case and
<LinkButton> text for upper case, reusing the same exceptions list as
the heading rule.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* docs: combine cspell, Vale, and component-label checks into one script

Renames lint:style to lint:content and adds cspell as a local
devDependency so all three content checks (spelling, Vale style
rules, and the component-label script) run from a single command
instead of requiring cspell to be run separately via CI's reusable
workflow. Spelling and style stay on separate engines under the
hood (cspell's dictionary is purpose-built for this codebase and
shared via VeryGoodOpenSource/very_good_workflows; Vale's built-in
speller isn't a good fit) but now share one local entry point.

Also fixes a real spell-check CI failure this branch introduced:
"vvago" (from the @vvago/vale package name) wasn't in the cspell
word list.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* docs: add proper nouns discovered while fixing heading casing

Adds Stripe, Fastfile, BuildContext, RenderObject, Apple, 1Password,
AOT, GuardSquare, LTS, ExportOptions.plist, Skia, and Impeller to the
Headings rule's exceptions list. These surfaced while applying the
sentence-case fixes in #583 — without them, this check will flag
legitimate proper nouns as false positives once both PRs merge.

* docs: silence known-permanent Shorebird.Headings exceptions

Adds TokenIgnores for headings intentionally left as Title Case in
PR #583:
- "vs"/"vs." trips Vale's capitalization rule unconditionally,
  regardless of surrounding case or the exceptions list.
- Compound product/brand names (Azure Key Vault, GCP Cloud KMS, App
  Store Connect, Firebase Remote Config, Launch Darkly, Hot Reload)
  where per-word exception matching breaks the phrase apart.
- Three numbered-list headings kept as Title Case for visual
  consistency with their siblings (see #583 for why).

Without this, these ~9 headings would show as permanent findings
forever, even after all the content PRs merge, making it impossible
to ever flip this check to blocking.

* docs: make Shorebird.Headings and Shorebird.Exclamation blocking

Bumps both custom rules from warning to error severity and flips
fail_on_error to true in CI, so they now actually gate merges instead
of just annotating PRs.

Vale.Terms (proper-noun capitalization) is explicitly downgraded to
warning via `Vale.Terms = warning`, staying non-blocking. It doesn't
respect code-fence exclusion the way our custom scope:text rules do,
and a TokenIgnores pattern matching one occurrence of a shell command
(e.g. `shorebird release android`) intermittently fails to suppress a
second, identical occurrence elsewhere in the same file - confirmed
with minimal reproductions, not a config mistake. Findings are still
reported, just don't block.

Shorebird.SecondPerson stays at warning too, since that guideline's
content work hasn't happened yet.

IMPORTANT: this branch's own CI will fail until #583 (heading
sentence-case fixes) merges - this branch still has the original
Title Case headings. Do not merge this PR before #583. Verified the
full combination (this branch + main + #583 + #584) passes cleanly
with fail_on_error: true.

* clean up github action

* docs: fix remaining CI failures and scope exceptions correctly

Fixes the two Shorebird.Headings failures found when CI ran against
the whole repo (not just src/content/docs):
- README.md's "# Shorebird Docs" heading
- The Framework Search Paths heading in hybrid-apps/ios.mdx, which a
  review commit deliberately reverted to Title Case as the literal
  Xcode setting name

Also moves Headings-specific exceptions out of .vale.ini's global
TokenIgnores and into Headings.yml's own exceptions list, since that
scopes them to just the Headings rule instead of blunting every rule
for that file. Confirmed the capitalization extension supports exact
multi-word phrase exceptions (e.g. "Azure Key Vault"), not just single
words.

This surfaced two real regressions along the way, both fixed:
- Removing "vs" from the global ignore (now scoped correctly) revealed
  that "Flutter vs. React Native" was never actually resolved - it
  needed "React Native" recognized as its own proper noun.
- Adding common words (Cloud, Reload, Framework) as bare exceptions
  triggers a bidirectional matching behavior in Vale's capitalization
  exceptions: it flags any *lowercase* use of that word elsewhere as
  wrongly-cased, wanting it to match the exception's given casing.
  Confirmed with minimal repros. Reverted those three to phrase-level
  exceptions (Framework Search Paths, GCP Cloud KMS) or, for "Flutter
  Hot Reload" specifically, kept it in .vale.ini's TokenIgnores since
  even the phrase-level exception collides with ordinary "hot reload"
  prose used elsewhere and TokenIgnores' literal-text redaction doesn't
  have this case-insensitive side effect.

Verified 0 errors from `vale --config=.vale.ini .` (matching what CI
actually scans) after this change.

* ci: run component-label lint in style-check job

The Shorebird.Headings Vale rule can't see MDX/JSX attributes, so
scripts/lint-component-labels.mjs (which checks TabItem/LinkButton label
casing) was only ever run locally via `npm run lint:content` and never
enforced in CI.

* docs: make Shorebird.SecondPerson blocking

Now that PR #585 rewrote all real first-person prose, the only remaining
SecondPerson matches are permanent false positives (i.e., a URL slug, 'US'
as a country, the default org name, a quoted heading, and one deliberate
first-person privacy pledge). Mask those via TokenIgnores and promote the
rule to error severity so it actually blocks CI going forward, matching
Shorebird.Headings and Shorebird.Exclamation.

Vale.Terms stays at warning severity - its code-fence/URL exclusion bug is
unrelated and still unresolved.

* docs: make Vale.Terms blocking by fixing its root causes

The Vale.Terms warnings weren't an unfixable tool bug after all. Bisecting
the false positives found two real, fixable causes:

- A fenced code block immediately following a <CodeTabs> opening tag with
  no blank line in between gets misparsed and loses its code-fence
  exclusion, which also corrupts scope/offset tracking for the rest of the
  file (patch.mdx, staging-patches.mdx x2). Fixed by adding the blank line,
  matching the existing convention before </CodeTabs>.
- faq.mdx used a shorter GitHub issue shorthand ('shorebird#3715') that
  TokenIgnores' existing 'shorebirdtech/shorebird#\d+' pattern didn't
  cover. Added a second entry for the short form.

With both fixed, the whole docs tree lints with 0 errors and 0 warnings, so
Vale.Terms can now run at its default error severity like the other rules,
closing the gap that let casing regressions slip through silently.

* Update .vale/styles/Shorebird/Exclamation.yml

Co-authored-by: Abhishek Doshi <adoshi26.ad@gmail.com>

* formatting

---------

Co-authored-by: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-authored-by: Abhishek Doshi <adoshi26.ad@gmail.com>
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3 participants