12 sections, and have three or four
second-order subheadings in
each section, plus a scattering of third-order subheads as well,
then readers will encounter 40 headings in total,
effectively
one every 250 words, or two per page. If the headings look alike
(using similar fonts and occupying the same positions on the
page) then confusion is guaranteed.
Text that has been overfragmented in this way often comes
with a complicated numbering system
that is supposed to pro-
vide guidance for readers. All modern word-processing packages
have ‘outliner’ facilities which allow you to automatically
create a numbered set of paragraphs
in many different formats,
often with varying levels of indentation as well. These features
are mainly designed for use in short reports. The outlining
facility can also be useful for making
conventional notes when
ploughing through a very hierarchic textbook or a similar
source. After using this facility for these purposes in their ear-
lier studies, quite a lot of doctoral
students also adopt it for
authoring large amounts of text. But applied over a very long
text like a doctorate an outliner approach can often be counter-
productive and seem like overkill.
In many technical or more
mathematical disciplines the
number sequence commonly adopted might look like this:
O R G A N I Z I N G A C H A P T E R O R PA P E R
◆
8 1
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