Prose & headings

#Explaining

#Explaining rather than narrating

The canvas is beside the prose and the reader can see it. A sentence restating what is drawn — the line rises steeply, then flattens — spends the reader's attention on what is already on the screen. The narrative carries what the picture cannot: why the state is what it is, what it costs, and which part of the argument it settles.

#Scaffolding, and adjectives in place of explanation

A scene does not announce what it is about to cover or summarise what it covered. Rhetorical setup — for a stronger reason than you might expect — and restating tails come out in the same pass, and what is left is the argument.

Adjectives are not explanation. The elegance here is remarkable — a single idea that unlocks everything that follows gives the reader nothing to follow; the same subtraction then runs on the remainder, so every step shrinks the pair gives them the mechanism. Where a step matters, what it does is what to write.

#Headings

#Headings that name their content

A heading names its content. A reader scanning a document is looking for a subject, and a heading that gestures at one costs them the scan: Where the method wastes its time cannot be searched for, where The repeated subtractions at the tail can. A heading marks a section of the argument rather than a scene — Scenes and what each shows.

#The opening scene and the four levels

The first scene opens on prose. The title is already at the top of the page, and a heading straight beneath it says the same thing twice. An h1 opening the first scene is styled as the document's opening heading, which is worth having only where the document's first part has a name of its own.

The title comes from the header, not from a heading, so all four levels belong to the argument: # for the document's parts, ## for the sections inside them, ### where a scene turns a corner.

#Dangling pronouns after a promoted sentence

Promoting a sentence into a heading leaves the paragraph beneath it pointing at something that is no longer in it. This, that chain, each line are the words to re-read: they resolved against the sentence that moved. Nothing mechanical catches it.

#Words and notation

#Maths as LaTeX

Mathematics is set as LaTeX wherever LaTeX is legal: $…$ inline, equation on a line of its own, and every rich-text attribute — a mark's label:, a heading, a definition's term:. An ASCII stand-in is not a smaller version of the same notation. It is different notation, and the reader has to decode it: $(a, b) \leftarrow (b, a \bmod b)$, not (a, b) <- (b, a mod b); $18 \times 18$, not 18 x 18.

#internote and note

The document is an internote, in its own prose as everywhere else. In this vocabulary note is the note callout, so a sentence calling the document this note names the wrong thing.