A thesis to a print-ready PDF

Turn one .wit file into a print-ready PDF essay — title, byline, epigraph, numbered sections, a data table, a captioned figure, and a Works Cited list — with no LaTeX preamble and no toolchain to set up. It is the whole academic spine in plain text, and every piece of it is core vocabulary, so nothing here needs a definition.

Step 1 — Title and byline

Give the paper an h1 title, then a byline whose lines are joined by the void br node so they stack inside one paragraph.

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

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

The three byline lines collapse into a single <p>Jordan Ellis <br>Ms. Rivera …</p> — consecutive non-blank lines are one paragraph, and @br br@ forces the visible break.

Step 2 — Epigraph

A blockquote holds the quotation and its attribution.

@blockquote "Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together." — Thomas Dekker blockquote@

Step 3 — Thesis and sections

Body text is just prose — no indentation, a blank line between paragraphs. Open each section with an h2 and mark emphasis with italicsor bold (or the em and strong nodes).

@h2 The Teenage Clock Runs Late h2@

The heart of the problem is not attitude but chemistry — teenagers lose an hour
or more of the rest their developing brain requires @em every single night em@.

Step 4 — A data table

Pass the rows inline. The first inner array is the header row and becomes th cells; every later array is a tr of td.

@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]]|

Cells are comma-separated within a row array — that is safe. The comma restriction is on record fields inside { }, not on table rows.

Step 5 — A captioned figure

wraps an img and a figcaption. Figures centre by default; size is a preset — small (220px), medium (380px), large (600px), full (100%) — or a number or percentage.

@figure
  @img |src assets/attendance.svg| |alt Bar chart: attendance rising from 82 to 94 percent after a later start| |size medium|
  @figcaption Figure 1. On-time attendance before and after a district shifted its start from 7:30 to 8:35. figcaption@
figure@

The src path is relative to the .wit file, and alt text is required for accessibility.

Step 6 — Works Cited

An ordered list of entries; italicise source titles with em.

@h2 Works Cited h2@

@ol
  @li American Academy of Pediatrics. "School Start Times for Adolescents." @em Pediatrics em@, vol. 134, no. 3, 2014, pp. 642–649. li@
  @li Dekker, Thomas. @em The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissell em@. 1603. li@
ol@

Step 7 — Render to PDF

wit build essay.wit -o essay.pdf

A three-page PDF with the title, byline, epigraph, five sections, the sleep table, the attendance figure, and the four-entry Works Cited list. PDF output paginates the default HTML theme through a headless system Chrome — swap -o essay.html for a styled web page, or add --fragment to inspect the raw markup.

Pitfalls

• Use real headings. Don't reach for the older thesis example's ##-style templates — those emit literal text in HTML, not headings. Write @h2 … h2@ directly, as this recipe does.
• Nest emphasis outer-italic. _*x*_ leaves the inner * literal; write *_x_* instead.
• No commas inside a record. A value like Attention, Perception inside { } splits into two fields. Inline table rows are fine — the comma there is a cell separator.

Variations

• In-text citations. Define a short cite template and named-idea definitions once, then cite by idea in prose — see A bibliography across files.
• Web instead of print. -o essay.html gives the styled document; --raw gives a reset-only page you style yourself.

See also

walks this exact file line by line; Creative writing covers flat prose; the core vocabulary reference lists every built-in node used here.