: Re: Larger structure - followup to Sense of Style by Steven Pinker I have read Steven Pinker's Sense of Style, which is a great book. In chapter 4, he talks about how to form lucid coherent

@Phylliss352

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My PhD thesis was divided in a nested manner into parts, chapters, sections and subsections. Whatever you're working on, I hope some of what helped me will help you:

Divide the work into numbered components, even if the reader never sees the numbers (although they can help the work reference other parts of itself).
Write a description of what each component's components do; for example, what do the sections in a given chapter do? Then zoom down even further. My thesis benefited from this for three reasons: I knew what to write (which helped me push on through the slog), I knew how I would explain it, and enclosing these descriptions in the thesis itself helped the readers follow. Whether you should enclose the descriptions I'll leave up to you, but write them at least.
As you write or redraft, think carefully about whether you've really explained things in the right order. If you have to move things around, fair enough; I know I certainly did. But if you've done the work above, you'll more readily notice better ideas, more easily think through how to do it, and know how to explain the revised structure.

I know this doesn't read like advice Pinker would have written, but it complements his advice well enough. If you do everything I suggest at the large-scale level and everything he suggests at the small-scale level, you should be fine. I linked to my thesis above in case my advice is easier to follow when you see a worked example. And if unfamiliarity with the terminology used therein threatens to distract you from seeing what role such sentences play, just nurble your way through everything but the section numbers.

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