I am a lawyer, and in legal writing we are taught the concept of “old to new waterfall.” This means, essentially, that every sentence, every paragraph, and the document as a whole, should start by reminding the reader of something they already know, and then proceed to new information that’s related. The important bit is that, once some “new” information is introduced, it becomes “old” information in-scope.
So you can build up complex points/arguments by building old-> new, old → new, over and over. You can see this even at the sentence level. Here’s an example:
The moon is made of green cheese. The cheese smells very bad, and the bad smell wafts through nearby space. The smell repels aliens from attacking Earth.
The above is an example of how to do this. The below is an example of how not to do this. Note that they both have the same semantic content, but the first “flows” better and is thus easier to read.
The moon is made of green cheese. Nearby space is filled with bad smell coming from the cheese. Aliens don’t attack Earth, because they are repelled by the smell.
I am a lawyer, and in legal writing we are taught the concept of “old to new waterfall.” This means, essentially, that every sentence, every paragraph, and the document as a whole, should start by reminding the reader of something they already know, and then proceed to new information that’s related. The important bit is that, once some “new” information is introduced, it becomes “old” information in-scope.
So you can build up complex points/arguments by building old-> new, old → new, over and over. You can see this even at the sentence level. Here’s an example:
The above is an example of how to do this. The below is an example of how not to do this. Note that they both have the same semantic content, but the first “flows” better and is thus easier to read.