How the writing here is made

Who writes it

Every piece carries a byline and a date, and the byline leads to a page about the person who wrote it. Today that is Nick Townsend, founder and editor. Nothing publishes without a named human deciding it should.

What gets a source, and what gets called reasoning

A finding gets a citation. If we say something is the case, the evidence for it is listed at the foot of the piece and you can go and read it.

Reasoning gets labelled as reasoning. Plenty of what is useful about laundry is an argument from how fibres and detergents behave rather than a result someone published, and we would rather say “this follows from” than dress an inference up as a finding.

A figure only brands publish gets the mechanism and no number. Where the only available quantity comes from someone with an interest in selling you more of something, we explain what is going on and decline to repeat the figure.

How sources are chosen

Nothing is cited that was not found while researching the piece. A citation hunted down afterwards to make a written sentence look better supported is worse than no citation at all, because it dresses the argument in evidence it did not actually use.

Academic work is cited by its DOI rather than by a publisher’s link, because the DOI is the permanent identifier and the publisher URL is only where it happens to resolve today. Titles are quoted exactly as published, which is why American spellings survive in them: our house style governs our prose and never someone else’s title page. Sources are listed in the order the argument uses them, so reading down the list retraces the piece.

Numbers live in one place

A wash interval is held once, in the schedule, and an article argues its way to it and links there rather than restating it. Two copies of a number drift apart, and the one that drifts is always the one somebody reads.

Reading times are counted

The minutes on each piece are counted from the finished page at 206 words a minute, never estimated. The discipline is that the count goes wherever the words go: one piece was corrected down from an estimate, another has been corrected upward twice as it grew. A guide that argues with other people’s confident numbers should not round its own.

Money, and what it may never buy

As things stand today there is no advertising on this site, no sponsorship, no affiliate link and no paid placement, and when a product is named it is because the argument needed a real example.

That may not always be true. A guide can be funded honestly, and we would rather tell you the rule we will keep than make a promise we might one day break. So here is the rule, and it holds whether or not any money is ever involved:

• Nothing is recommended because of a commercial relationship. No payment buys a mention, a place in a list, or a kinder verdict, and no arrangement gets a veto over what a piece concludes.
• If it would change what we would otherwise write, we do not take it. That is the whole test, and it is the one that decides.
• You find out where you meet it, not in a policy page. A commercial link is labelled in the text beside it and marked as paid in the underlying markup, and any piece carrying one says so before you start reading it.

Separately, and permanently: we are not affiliated with or endorsed by any standards body, and we will not accept a relationship that requires us to soften what the evidence says.

When we get it wrong

We correct in public rather than quietly. A correction that changes what a piece concludes is noted on the piece itself rather than edited away, because a reader who acted on the old version deserves to know it moved.

Three examples, and the first two are ours:

• A fortnight, unsourced. An early draft on bedsheets carried an interval we could not stand up, alongside a figure for how much moisture a sleeper loses in a night that overstated it by a wide margin. Both were ours, and both were cut before publication once they were checked properly.
• The pillow statistics. The frightening numbers about what lives inside a pillow trace back to a single newspaper article from 2000 with no study behind it. We say so in the piece rather than repeat them.
• Never washing denim. The advice not to wash jeans at all is widely repeated and costs you the garment. The piece argues against it and shows the working.

If you think something here is wrong, please write to hello@thewashguide.app. The writing is meant to survive being argued with, and twice already it has not.