# The annotated document — method and template

**Ships with:** The Assurance Line.
**Who this is for:** anyone who has to brief others on a primary document — a supervisory instrument, a
standard, a research paper — and wants the brief to survive being checked.
**Who this is not for:** anyone looking for a summary. The premise of this format is that summaries are
where the errors enter.

---

## Why the annotation, not the summary

The video is the read. **The annotation is the thing you can cite later** — and it is the artifact
because a summary cannot be audited and a marked-up document can.

The discipline is small and it is the whole product:

- Go in **the document's order**, never your own. The moment you reorganize into your own argument you
  have written an opinion piece with extra steps, and the reader is trusting you for fidelity.
- **Disagree in place**, at the passage, not in a closing section.
- **Mark what you could not verify.** The sentence that separates this from every account that
  launders a secondary claim into a primary one is: *"they cite this; I have not read the underlying
  study."*
- **Count the unit and never estimate it.** Findings, pages, recommendations — whatever the document's
  natural unit is. The count is the credibility claim of the entire format.

---

## The four marks

Every annotation is one of exactly four, and each passage gets one:

| Mark | Means | Obligation |
|---|---|---|
| **✓ AGREE** | The document is right and the point is load-bearing | State why it matters, briefly |
| **✗ DISAGREE** | The document overreaches, or is wrong | State the counter-argument at that passage, not later |
| **? UNVERIFIED** | A figure or claim the document attributes to a source I did not open | Name the tier and say so plainly |
| **⊘ NOT LICENSED** | A conclusion readers commonly draw from this passage that the passage does not support | Name the overreach and refuse it |

**⊘ is the one that does the most work** and the one nobody else publishes. A document says X; the
industry reads it as X+1. Marking the gap is the most useful thing a practitioner can do with a primary
source — and the current supervisory guidance is the standing example, where a deferral is widely read
as an exemption.

---

## The template

```
## [Section / finding N] — [the document's own heading]

> [the passage, quoted verbatim, with its locator]

**Mark:** ✓ / ✗ / ? / ⊘

**What it says.** [plain-terms restatement — no interpretation yet]

**What it means.** [the mechanism, in operational terms]

**My read.** [agreement, disagreement, or the limit of what I can check]

**What it does not license.** [the available overreach, named and refused]
```

---

## The tier scale, stated on camera and in the margin

| Tier | Meaning |
|---|---|
| **S** | Primary, opened and read by me |
| **A** | Cited by the document; I did not open the underlying source |
| **C** | Secondary reporting of a primary I could not reach |
| **D** | Not used. If it would be D, it does not ship. |

---

## What never happens

- **No count you have not counted.** Not the page count, not the finding count.
- **No skipping the boring findings.** The completeness is the product. If a finding is dull, say it is
  dull and move on in ten seconds — but do not silently drop it, because the promise was *every* finding.
- **No quoting a figure the document attributes to someone else as though the document established it.**

---

*Vikram Jha · The Assurance Line · vikramjha.work*
*Free to use, copy, and adapt. No attribution required, nothing gated.*