What a document covers

#One topic, named by the title

A document teaches one topic, and the header's title names it. A reader who has read the title can predict what the document holds. A scene they could not have predicted needs a reason the prose gives them, or it belongs to another document.

#Constructs the topic did not ask for

The commonest departure is a canvas environment nobody asked for: a code environment in a document about a statistical result, a plot of something adjacent in a document about a historical one. The test is whether the construct carries the topic or decorates it. A topic that is code needs code; a topic about how two quantities relate needs that relationship plotted; a topic that is neither needs neither.

#Length as an outcome

A document covers its topic and stops, and its length is what that took. A scene written to reach a length compiles exactly as well as the rest of the document, and the reader spends attention on it that the argument did not need.

#Breadth of vocabulary as a non-goal

No construct is reached for because the document has not used it yet. Each one is a form the reader reads for the first time, and a form spent on nothing the argument required is a cost with no return. Selecting canvas content applies the same test to a single mark.

Repetition is not the defect it looks like. Three tables in a row is three scenes doing the same kind of work, and if that is wrong the fix is in the scenes: repainting the third table as a graph leaves the repetition where it was and adds a form the content did not ask for.