: Re: Sentence starters for summaries? I'm writing a technical book (step-by-step sort of book) and noticed that all my summaries start with 'In this chapter we ...'. What would be some other sentence

@Jamie945

Vote Up Vote Down

In my documentation I tend to use a "sentence starter" such as "The following topics describe..." for topics that wrap subtopics that might be considered reference material, and (borrowing from section III 10 of The Elements of Style here) an "opening sentence that simply indicates by its subject with what the following topics are to be principally concerned." Essentially, this means that you simply start writing the material and introduce it that way.

Over time as I have developed more material that primarily lives online, I tend to use the latter because online documentation systems tend to have a table of contents (TOC) built into it that is always visible. In that case, you do not need to write a listing into the parent topic because the TOC does the work for you. You can see what the chapter contains by simply glancing at the TOC. In converting older publications to this format, I notice that I end up removing a lot of this kind of material. On the other hand, if you are publishing a printed book, a listing can be very useful.

(0)

Login to post a comment!