The annotated essay

Read one complete, verified document end to end and understand every construct in it. This is the payoff page that ties the thesis, table, and creative-writing recipes together — a real 53-line essay that builds to a three-page PDF, walked block by block.

The title

@h1 Let Them Sleep: The Case for Later School Start Times h1@

The opening h1 becomes the document title. The colon and the rest of the line are ordinary text inside it.

The byline

Three source lines, each ending in the void break node:

Jordan Ellis @br br@
Ms. Rivera — English 11 @br br@
5 July 2026

These collapse into one paragraph joined by line breaks. Consecutive non-blank lines are a single paragraph; the break node is how you force a visible line break inside one. It is a void element — it has no body.

The epigraph

@blockquote "Sleep is the golden chain that ties health…" — Thomas Dekker blockquote@

A blockquote sets the quotation apart. The straight quotes and the em dash pass through exactly as typed.

The thesis statement

A plain paragraph — no wrapping node, no indentation. This is the core Wit move: prose is prose. It closes with the argument's three-part roadmap in ordinary sentences.

A section heading

@h2 The Teenage Clock Runs Late h2@

Every section uses the same shape. Body paragraphs follow, and one of them ends with an inline emphasis:

… the rest their developing brain requires @em every single night em@.

The em node and the … mark are interchangeable; this file uses the node form here and a strong node a few lines later.

The data table

@table |caption Recommended versus actual sleep for adolescents| |rows [[Group, Recommended sleep, Typical school night], [Teens 13 to 18, 8 to 10 hours, 6.5 to 7 hours]]|

The first inner array is the header row and becomes thcells; each later array is a table row of td. Caption and rows ride in parameters; cells are comma-separated within a row array — which is safe. The comma restriction applies only to record fields inside braces, never to table rows.

The captioned figure

@figure
  @img |src assets/attendance.svg| |alt Bar chart showing attendance rising from 82 to 94 percent| |size medium|
  @figcaption Figure 1. On-time attendance before and after a later start. figcaption@
figure@

centres its contents by default. size mediummaps to a 380-pixel maximum width (the presets are small, medium, large, and full, or a number or percentage). The alt text is required, and the src path is relative to the essay file.

The conclusion

Another h2 and a single closing paragraph. No new construct — a reminder that most of a document is just prose under headings.

The Works Cited list

@ol
  @li American Academy of Pediatrics. "School Start Times…" @em Pediatrics em@, vol. 134, no. 3, 2014. li@
  @li Dekker, Thomas. @em The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissell em@. 1603. li@
ol@

Each li is one entry; em italicises the source title inside it. Straight quotes render as entities and the en dash passes through.

Build and open

wit build essay.wit -o essay.pdf

The finished file builds to a three-page, 158,820-byte PDF. For HTML instead, use -o essay.html; to inspect the raw markup, add --fragment.

What the whole file teaches

Flat prose is the default. Headings, emphasis, a table, a figure, and a list are each one node. Nothing needs a definition because every construct is core vocabulary — and that is the whole point.

See also

is the how-to version of this walk; Load a CSV into a table deepens the table; Creative writing deepens the flat prose.