: Re: Is there an alternative to using signposts or questions in essays? Strangely, in the past two days I've read two opposing viewpoints on how to introduce topics in academic essays. I first read

@Rambettina586

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I wrote the first answer you mentioned. The advice I quoted from Pinker therein is intended for experts explaining to a perhaps broader audience than an essay has. The argument against excessive metadiscourse stands, but questions aren't the only alternative. I advise reading the next few pages, which exemplifies a few other techniques. From my experience writing and reading academic papers, one question-free strategy is to summarize what is known or had been argued, what is agreed on or not, and how specific developments have moved the subject forward, with concise references to sources and as little name-dropping and discussion of theorists and researchers as possible. The review section of any PhD thesis in your field will illustrate how this is done.

Edit: I thought I'd quote an excerpt of my PhD thesis (from Sec. 2.6.6) to illustrate the technique:

There are two approaches to gauge fixing the graviton two-point
function. One approach includes a gauge-fixing term in the linearised
theory, and obtains the propagator . The other obtains a graviton correlator after complete
gauge fixing. The graviton two-point function obtained by the latter
method, hereafter the gauge-invariant graviton two point function, is
physical in the sense that its gauge degrees of freedom are completely
fixed. This two-point function is infrared-divergent in the Poincaré
patch of de Sitter space [62].

This discovery began the debate of gravity’s infrared issues, and this
controversy has some similarities with an issue in the FP-ghost
sector. One subtlety was that the infrared divergences of the
two-point function may be expressed in a pure-gauge form [63, 64, 65],
and the infrared divergences may be removed entirely with a suitable
choice of mode functions [66]. In this sense, these infrared
divergences are gauge-artefact. Indeed, the two-point function has
been given an infrared-finite construction in de Sitter space in some
other coordinate patches [67, 68, 69] and covariant gauges [70, 71,
72].

After Faizal and Higuchi introduced the FMP in Ref. 2 to address the
FP-ghost sector implications in 2008, they provided a treatment of the
graviton sector in the global patch in 2012, which also relied on
temporarily endowing a field (in this case the graviton) with a
fictitious mass [73]. The resulting gauge-invariant graviton two-point
function is known to be equivalent to the linearised Weyl tensor [74],
which is both de Sitter invariant and infrared-convergent in a vacuum
state of the theory that is like a Euclidean Bunch–Davies vacuum [75,
76, 77]. Higuchi and I have previously observed 2 that, since Ref.
2 obtains the Weyl tensor as its gauge-invariant graviton two-point
function, non-interacting linearised gravity has no infrared problem
in de Sitter space.

However, what is contentious is whether interacting linearised gravity
retains an infrared problem for the graviton propagator. Some say it
does [78], while others say it does not [79]. One could similarly ask
whether interacting linearised gravity retains an infrared problem for
the FP-ghost propagator. The debate between sources such as Refs. [78]
and [79] regarding the graviton two-point function is analogous to the
FP-ghost sector issues I consider in this thesis. However, I will
consider the FP-ghost sector issues in all the spacetimes of interest
identified in Sec. 1.2.

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