11. Revision Checklist

Run each significant transition against this list before deciding it stays as written. Each item corresponds to a test in §7 or a pattern in §8. Read every join cold — covering the preceding unit — before ticking anything.

Orientation

• Reading the far side cold, I can answer when, where and whose vantage within the first two sentences.
• Any delay of the anchor is a deliberate drift: the uncertainty is the character’s, it is bounded, and the prose is supplying something else meanwhile.
• I know which anchor type I have used (§6.3), and I chose it rather than defaulting to it.
• The reader is not oriented twice.

The bill

• I have counted the dimensions this gap changes — time, space, protagonist, causality, intentionality — and the orientation is proportionate to the count.
• Where four or five dimensions change, the join carries a paratextual anchor, a compound transition, or has been reconsidered structurally.
• The reader knows whether this unit happens after the previous one or alongside it.
• Backward movements in time are declared in the first clause.

The departure

• The last sentence before the gap names a destination, an intention, a person or an object.
• I have checked whether the arrival is repeating something the departure already established.

The interval

• I can say in one sentence what happens during the gap.
• Nothing the reader will later need to have understood is inside the gap, unless the omission is deliberate and the reader will be made aware of it.
• Where the interval mattered, it is bridged; where it did not, it is not summarised.
• The size of the ellipsis is legible — explicitly where the reader cannot infer it, implicitly where they can.

Economy

• The new unit’s own business begins within about forty words of the gap.
• No journey is narrated that is merely a distance.
• Nothing the reader would have assumed is stated.

Second jobs

• At the joins that matter, the transition is doing something besides orienting.
• Any echo is detectable on a first reading at ordinary speed by a reader not looking for it.
• Fewer than one join in four is doing conspicuous double duty.

The manuscript

• I have run the transition inventory (§5.5) and no single technique accounts for more than two-thirds of the joins.
• The variation in technique tracks what each gap requires, rather than varying at random.
• My typographic signals mean something consistent across the book, and the prose still anchors if a blank line is lost at a page break.
• Some joins are plain, so that the loaded ones can be felt.