Off-limits topics in the brief

Yes, you can ask a judge not to mention something: "please don't mention X" is one of the most under-used lines in a brief, and any judge worth commissioning honours it. It costs nothing to write, needs no reason, and removes an entire category of risk from a clip you are otherwise trusting a stranger to get right.

An exclusion, not a request

There is a real difference between saying what you do not want covered and saying what you do not want mentioned at all. Saying what you do not want is usually about register: no mockery, nothing too clinical, keep it warm. This is narrower and more absolute. It marks a specific topic - a body part, a comparison, a word, a memory - as one the judge should route around entirely, in any register, however the rest of the brief is worded.

Because it is an exclusion rather than a positive instruction, it needs no justification. "No comments about X" is a complete sentence. A professional judge does not ask why, does not probe to understand the reasoning, and does not treat the exclusion as an opening for a follow-up question. The reason, if there is one, is yours to keep.

Why no reason is required

This sits inside the same consent logic that governs the rest of a commission. Judges set their own boundaries and decline work that falls outside them, without owing an explanation for where those boundaries sit. The buyer gets the same courtesy in reverse: a stated limit is honoured because it was stated, not because the judge was persuaded it was reasonable. Treating a buyer's off-limits topic as something to negotiate would be the same overreach as a buyer pushing on a judge's stated limit, and neither belongs in a professional exchange.

Put the line early in the brief, before the specifics, so it is impossible to miss. One sentence is enough; padding it with an apology or a paragraph of context only draws more attention to the exact thing you were trying to route around.

How this differs from a hard limit

A judge's own stated limits and a buyer's off-limits topic look similar on the page but sit on different sides of the transaction. A judge's limit says what they will never perform, for anyone, and it exists before your brief arrives. Your exclusion says what you do not want addressed in your clip specifically, and it can be as narrow or unusual as you like without needing to match anything the judge has published. Both are absolute once stated, and both are respected the same way: without argument, without a request for justification, and without treating the boundary as an opening bid.

It also differs from simply not mentioning a topic in your brief and hoping it stays out of the clip. Silence on your part is not an instruction; a judge working from an incomplete brief may still land on the exact subject you were hoping to avoid, purely because nothing told them not to. Writers routinely overestimate how much of their meaning reaches the reader - across five experiments, Kruger and colleagues (2005) found people believe they communicate over email more effectively than they actually can - and a preference that was never written down reaches the reader not at all. The exclusion has to be written down to do any work at all.

What this protects against

A brief with no exclusions leaves everything on the table by default, and most judges will assume that a topic near the material is fair game unless told otherwise. That is a reasonable default for a stranger working from a photo and a few lines of text, but it is not always the right default for the buyer, and the fix is entirely in the buyer's hands. This is a smaller, more precise version of asking a judge to avoid your worry entirely rather than address it - sometimes the right answer to a sensitive subject is not careful handling, it is silence.

No automated tool needs this kind of instruction, because a scoring system has no topics it reaches for unprompted beyond what it was built to measure - which is one of the actual, practical differences between the two options rather than an abstract one. A person, working from a brief and their own judgement, needs to be told, and telling them plainly is the whole of the etiquette here.

Making the exclusion count

Be specific rather than broad where you can. "Nothing about size" is clearer and easier to honour than "nothing negative," which asks the judge to guess where negative begins. If a number matters to you and you would rather it stayed out of the conversation entirely, taking it yourself, privately, with a proper method removes the question before it can come up in a clip at all. And if what you actually want is a professional opinion that stays within a clearly fenced topic, an automated score has no topic to wander into in the first place, which is worth knowing if the exclusion matters more to you than the register does. For anyone still weighing a person against that kind of tool for a specific request, Rate Cock lays out how the two compare directly.