◆ Does the chapter use an analytic or argumentative mode of
exposition (generally better in terms of organizing and
personalizing your argument) or does it rely on a descriptive
approach (generally worse for organizing and personalizing
your argument).
These checks will only take you five minutes to do for a nor-
mal chapter, but the answers you get may sometimes surprise
you. You may find that what you have written is a considerable
distance away from what you planned to do in advance, but
also from what you thought you were doing in producing the
raw text and making any edits since. Sometimes the text may
seem to have a life or tendencies of its own, and this can be an
important datum for you to consider. If you find a mismatch
between the initial chapter plan and its implementation, do
not immediately conclude that your text must be flogged back
into line with the master plan. If in the end this is how you
wrote it, that may be because this is how that text hadto be
written by you. And if your initial structure was different,
perhaps it is that which should be changed? Sometimes your
sectioning, headings, subheadings, signposts and promises
reflect your original plan while the body of the text you have
written in fact does something different. Bringing the two back
into sync by dropping an unrealistic plan can sometimes sort
out problems very straightforwardly.
Books do not always obey the author’s orders and
this book ... quickly became obstreperous.
Claire Tomalin^12
A show has a mind of its own, and it’s wrong to
push it in a direction it doesn’t want to go.
Neil Simon^13The next stage of remodelling can be as psychologically
uncomfortable as realistically summarizing each paragraph. If
the text does not read well, you must try to generate one alterna-
tive schemafor the chapter, a new structure that differs substan-
tially from the existing one. On a new sheet of paper, set out
some alternative section and subsection headings for the chapter,
spacing them out evenly from top to bottom of the new sheet.
DEVELOPING YOUR TEXT◆ 145