Organizing a Chapter or Paper: the Micro-Structure

Abstract

The building blocks of a completed thesis are chapters. Yet if these blocks are to hold together they must themselves be effectively structured internally, so that they can bear a load rather than crumbling away under pressure. A first step then is to divide the chapter into parts. In addition, two elements of designing internal structure are commonly mishandled: devising headings and subheadings to highlight your organizing pattern; and writing the starts and ends of the chapter and its main sections. I discuss these three issues in turn.

George said: ‘You know we are on the wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.’

A character in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat ¹