When forming a horizontal relationship between ideas (e.g. supporting sentences of a summary statement), they should form an inductive or deductive argument. This makes the connection of ideas more clear to the reader and improves overall reader understanding.
An inductive argument is a collection of ideas that can be described with a plural noun e.g. reasons, steps, problems.
A deductive argument is a statement about the situation and the second idea comments on the subject and predicate of the first. The third idea states the implications. For example, dogs are great, Noodle is a dog, therefore Noodle is great.
See also:
- The Minto Pyramid Principle
- SCQA introduces a document and states the overall situation that all relationships should ladder up to in a tree structure
- Always give the summarizing idea first in this case pertains to inductive arguments
Links to this note
-
Don’t Use Deductive Arguments to Connect Key Lines, Use Inductive
Connecting key lines in a document is important to answer the key question and provide clear reasoning. To do that, structure the document using inductive arguments rather than deductive arguments. That’s because a deductive structure could introduce a large distance (number of paragraphs) between the problem and answer which the reader would be required to hold in their head and build their own connections which can be confusing and difficult to read.