Prose & headings

#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 a step on what is already on the screen, and the reader reaches the next step having been told nothing. 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.

#Referring to the canvas

Where the detail shows something, the prose names it — the mark, the value, the region — so the reader knows which part of the picture the sentence is about. A mark is named by its label: rather than by where it sits: the upper line stops being true the moment a domain changes, and means nothing at all in a scene where the reader can pan. A narrative that never refers to its detail, and a detail nothing in the narrative points at, are two documents side by side.

#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 do; 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 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. Narrative headings are the one place teaching as a story is paid for by somebody else.

#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 immediately beneath it says the same thing twice — an h1 that does open the first scene is set as the document's opening heading, which is worth having only where the document's first part has a name of its own.

Below that, all four levels are available and a document of any length uses more than one: # for the document's parts, ## for the sections inside them, ### where a scene turns a corner. Heading 1 is not reserved for the title — the title comes from the header — so it is free for the parts.

#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. It is the defect editing introduces most often, and it survives every mechanical check there is.

#Maths as LaTeX

Every mathematical expression is set as LaTeX wherever LaTeX is legal: $…$ inline, equation on a line of its own, and inside every rich-text attribute — a mark's label:, a table cell, a heading, a definition's term:, an environment's title:. 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