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Q&A Larger structure - followup to Sense of Style by Steven Pinker

It seems to me that what Pinker is describing at the sentence and paragraph level is substantially what most books on story are describing at the level of a document as a whole. Stories have a cohe...

posted 6y ago by Mark Baker‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed by user avatar System‭ · 2020-01-03T20:41:54Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34828
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T06:41:30Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34828
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T06:41:30Z (over 4 years ago)
It seems to me that what Pinker is describing at the sentence and paragraph level is substantially what most books on story are describing at the level of a document as a whole. Stories have a coherent shape and that shape has been mapped in various ways by different authors, but broadly the same shape underlies what all or most of them describe.

Coherence, the property of all the bits of a thing going together in a way that makes sense, is a fundamental property of writing at any scale. The ways in which coherence works, however, may be different at different scales. That is, how the pieces are connected and how long you have to connect the pieces up before you lose the reader may differ as you scale up or down.

Some of the most prominent books on the shape of stories are:

- _Story_ by Robert McKee
- _The Writer's Journey_ by Christopher Vogler
- _Aspects of the Novel_ by EM Forster

But there are many such works, covering both fiction and non fiction.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2018-04-04T15:33:23Z (about 6 years ago)
Original score: 1