The null format is plain text and nothing else. It is the format that remains when every other format has been stripped away. It is the foundation beneath the leaf, the text, the card, the page, the deck, the plan, and the note. All of those formats inherit from null. Null inherits from nothing.

The encoding is UTF-8 in all cases without exception. There is no fallback encoding. There is no compatibility mode.

There is no measure. The text has no opinion about the width of the line. The null format does not know where it is. It does not know whether it is being read in a seventy-character terminal, a Telegram message bubble, a small box inside a deck, a browser window, or a field in a database. It does not care. The text reflows to whatever contains it, and this is not a limitation but the entire point. A format that specifies a measure has already decided where it lives. Null has not decided where it lives. Null lives wherever you put it.

Most null text is a single paragraph. It is a message, a thought, a passage. When the text contains more than one paragraph, the paragraphs are separated by exactly one blank line. There is no indentation at the first line of any paragraph. There are no headings, no subheadings, no section numbers, no bullet points, no numbered lists, no tables, no rules, no section breaks, no decorative elements of any kind. The text is prose and the prose is continuous and uninterrupted from its first word to its last.

The em dash is the principal mark of punctuation beyond the period, the comma, and the colon. It is rendered as the Unicode character U+2014, without a space before and without a space after, thus—thus. It is never replaced by two hyphens. It is never surrounded by spaces. It is never replaced by an en dash. The em dash closes a clause against the words it joins, and the absence of spaces is not a stylistic preference but a rule that is not subject to negotiation.

The en dash is U+2013 and is used in exactly two offices. First, for ranges: 10–20, March–April, pages 4–7. Second, for compound modifiers where the elements are of equal weight or where one element is itself a compound: Nobel Prize–winning, Sapir–Whorf, New York–style, and the open compounds of similar construction. The en dash is never used where an em dash is meant. The two are different characters performing different work and they are not interchangeable.

The minus sign in negative numbers is U+2212, the Unicode minus, and not a hyphen. The hyphen is U+002D and is used only for hyphenation. These three marks—em dash, en dash, hyphen—together with the minus sign are four distinct characters and confusing any one of them for any other is an error in the text.

Quotation marks and apostrophes are straight, not curly. The quotation mark is U+0022. The apostrophe is U+0027. This is a deliberate choice and not a limitation. Curly quotation marks are typographic furniture belonging to typeset formats. In null, where the text is plain and the rendering environment is unknown, straight marks are the native and the only form. Commas and periods are placed inside closing quotation marks in all cases, following the American convention, which is the convention of this house regardless of what logic or the British might prefer.

No character in the text is ever used for formatting. The asterisk is a character, not a bold marker. The underscore is a character, not an italic marker. The backtick is a character, not a code fence. The hash is a character, not a heading. Markdown does not exist in null. No markup language of any kind exists in null. If a word requires emphasis, the sentence must be rebuilt so that the word's position, its rhythm, or its context provides the emphasis. Emphasis is achieved through composition or it is not achieved. The null format does not provide emphasis. The writer provides emphasis.

The text begins without preamble. There is no title block, no author line, no date, no metadata of any kind. These things belong to the formats that inherit from null. In null there is only the text.

The text ends when it ends. There is no colophon mark, no trailing whitespace, no trailing newline. The last character of the last sentence is the last character of the text. What the surrounding system does with that—whether it appends a newline for the file system, whether it wraps it in a message bubble, whether it stores it in a database field—is not the concern of the format. The format is the text. The text is the format.

And so it is blazoned.