A well-formed claim is the smallest sentence that can be wrong on its own, carrying its source passage and links to what it changes.

Errors get found where each entry is small enough to be wrong on its own. In 1494 the Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli published one of the first printed descriptions of double-entry bookkeeping, in his Summa de arithmetica. Its discipline is still the auditor's. Every transaction is recorded as its own entry, each entry points back to a document that justifies it, such as an invoice or a receipt, and each one posts to the accounts it changes. When the books fail to balance, a clerk can trace the fault to a single line, check that line against its paper, and see which totals move when it is corrected. A ledger of vague summaries would allow none of that. Claims work the same way. A claim small enough to be wrong by itself, carrying the passage behind it and links to what depends on it, can be checked, fixed and carried forward. A sprawling one can only be argued about.

Written by leo