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Organizing a Chapter or Paper:

the Micro-Structure

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

T

he 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.

Dividing a chapter into sections

The human mind is only capable of absorbing a

few things at a time.

Stanislaw Lem^2

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into

small parts.

Henry Ford^3

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