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The misconception at the heart of your question is that there has to be coherence between chapters, similar to the coherence between paragraphs. In technical and academic writing there is indeed c...
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#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T06:41:30Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34887 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
System
·
2019-12-08T06:41:30Z (almost 5 years ago)
The misconception at the heart of your question is that there has to be coherence between chapters, similar to the coherence between paragraphs.
In **technical and academic writing** there is indeed coherence, usually, and then _the same principles apply_ for the transition from the last paragraph of the preceding chapter to the first paragraph of the current chapter as between two paragraphs within one chapter. In other words: The chapter break is nothing but a paragraph break, and you connect chapters in the same way that you connect paragraphs.
In **fiction** , the break between chapters is often a break in time, place, person, viewpoint, or chronology as well. What happens at the beginning of the current chapter appears, at first, to be totally unrelated to what we have read at the end of the preceding chapter. Only as we continue reading do we gather more and more clues as to how what we read now relates to what we have read before.
A paragraph _always_ establishes a connection (signified by an arrow in the schema below) to the preceding paragraph by referring to the topic ("A") of the preceding paragraph before beginning its own ("B"):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kcUxn.png)
A chapter, on the other hand, _can_ begin with a topic completely unrelated to any of the topics of the preceding chapter(s) and connect to the preceding text at a later point:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/p4Zys.png)
In my schema, forward arrows signify a topic being _continued_ in a following sentence or paragraph, while a backward arrow signifies a _backward reference_. In reality, of course, every continuation is also a backward reference, and all arrows should point both ways. I just found unidirectional forward arrows to be less confusing, as they correspond to the forward movement of the reader through the text – who might want to browse back to where "X" was mentioned at at first, when it comes up in the second chapter again.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2018-04-07T10:15:19Z (over 6 years ago)
Original score: 0