Scientific writing 3.0: A reader and writer's guide - Jean-Luc Lebrun, Justin Lebrun 2021

Syntactic rules for headings
Headings-subheadings: the skeleton of your paper
Paper structure and purpose

Michael Alley, an author I designated as one of the giants who enabled me to see further afield in the world of scientific writing, advocates parallel syntax in structures. It does make the structure easier to read. Three styles are commonly found in headings and subheadings: Noun phrases such as ’Parameter determination’, verb phrases such as ’Determining the parameters,’ and (in life science papers mostly) full sentences such as ’The parameters are determined statically’. To help the reader rebuild a story from its structure, headings at the same indentation level or subheadings under the same heading should adopt a parallel syntax. In the sample structure, headings 2 and 3 are noun phrases. Within heading 3, all subheadings are also noun phrases.

In the following structure, the syntax is not parallel.

1. Introduction

2. Interference mechanism

3. Design rules

4. Proposing a solution

4.1Three layer prediction algorithm

4.1.1Algorithm classification

4.1.2Layer prediction comparison

5. Proposed recognition

6. Simulation studies

7. Discussion

8. Conclusions

This is not a good structure for many reasons. Focusing solely on the lack of consistency, one cannot miss the “one parent and only one child” problem: heading 4 has one subheading only 4.1 (no 4.2). The syntax also lacks consistency at the same heading level: headings 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are all single-noun phrases; but heading 4 starts with a present participle ’Proposing,’ thus breaking parallelism in syntax.