Context This section describes the forces at play, including technological, political, social, and project local. These forces are probably in tension, and should be called out as such. The language in this section is value-neutral. It is simply describing facts.
Decision This section describes our response to these forces. It is stated in full sentences, with active voice. "We will ..."
Status A decision may be "proposed" if the project stakeholders haven't agreed with it yet, or "accepted" once it is agreed. If a later ADR changes or reverses a decision, it may be marked as "deprecated" or "superseded" with a reference to its replacement.
Consequences This section describes the resulting context, after applying the decision. All consequences should be listed here, not just the "positive" ones. A particular decision may have positive, negative, and neutral consequences, but all of them affect the team and project in the future.
The whole document should be one or two pages long. We will write each ADR as if it is a conversation with a future developer. This requires good writing style, with full sentences organized into paragraphs. Bullets are acceptable only for visual style, not as an excuse for writing sentence fragments. (Bullets kill people, even PowerPoint bullets.)
Status Accepted.
Consequences One ADR describes one significant decision for a specific project. It should be something that has an effect on how the rest of the project will run.
The consequences of one ADR are very likely to become the context for subsequent ADRs. This is also similar to Alexander's idea of a pattern language: the large-scale responses create spaces for the smaller scale to fit into.
Developers and project stakeholders can see the ADRs, even as the team composition changes over time.
The motivation behind previous decisions is visible for everyone, present and future. Nobody is left scratching their heads to understand, "What were they thinking?" and the time to change old decisions will be clear from changes in the project's context.