Anchor — The first concrete cue after a gap that answers when, where or whose vantage this is. Its function is not to inform but to stop the reader continuing in the abandoned frame. Twelve types are tabulated at §6.3.
Anchor position — The number of words after a gap at which the anchor arrives. A measurable revision variable; thresholds at §6.2.
Asterism — The typographic mark ⁂, three asterisks in a triangle, historically used as a section divider. §6.6.
Bridging object — This chapter’s proposed sixth technique: a physical thing continuous across a gap, whose recurrence does the anchoring by identity rather than by resemblance. Distinguished from the match-cut at §4.6.
Contextual frame — Emmott’s term for the reader’s mental representation of a specific episode’s context: who is present, where, and when. §3.2.
Dimension count — The number of situational dimensions (time, space, protagonist, causality, intentionality) a gap changes. The chapter’s best single predictor of how much orientation a gap requires. §3.3, §7.1 test 2.
Dinkus — A small typographic ornament, commonly three spaced asterisks, used to mark a section break where a blank line would be lost at a page boundary. §6.6.
Drift — A deliberate delay of the anchor, used to reproduce a character’s disorientation. Distinguished from an orphaned cut by the criterion that the anchor still arrives, late and on purpose. §6.5.
Ellipsis — Genette’s duration category: story time elapses while discourse time is nil. Classified as explicit, implicit or hypothetical; as definite or indefinite; as qualified or unqualified. §3.1.
Event-indexing model — Zwaan, Langston and Graesser’s account of readers monitoring incoming events for continuity along five dimensions, with a measurable processing cost at each discontinuity. §3.3.
False ellipsis — A gap that contains the event the book turns on, presented as an ordinary interval. Genette’s paralipsis wearing an ellipsis’s clothes. §8.8.
Frame recall — Emmott’s term for retrieving a previously constructed contextual frame rather than building a new one. Much cheaper than frame switching, and systematically over-paid for in drafts. §3.2.
Frame repair — Correcting a contextual frame built on a mistaken assumption. The actual cost of an orphaned cut: not confusion, but the dismantling of a confidently built false representation. §3.2.
Frame switch — Abandoning the primed contextual frame for another. The cognitive event a transition manages. §3.2.
Handoff — A transition that changes viewpoint, location or both. The most expensive technique in the taxonomy, because it typically shifts three or four dimensions at once. §4.5.
Hard cut — A gap crossed with no bridging language; the orientation cost is transferred entirely to the opening sentence of the new unit. §4.1.
Interval legibility — Whether a reader can estimate the size of a gap. Independent of whether the gap is explicit: an implicit ellipsis can be perfectly legible if the far side carries evidence.
Iterative — Genette’s frequency category: narrating once what happened many times. A transition instrument in disguise, crossing indefinite time while characterising. §3.1.
Launching line — This chapter’s term for the last sentence before a gap, considered as a transition instrument. A departure that names a destination pre-pays the arrival. §5.3, §7.1 test 3.
Managed ellipsis — The chapter’s structural definition of a transition, together with re-anchoring: a gap whose edges have been finished. §1.2.
Match-cut (echo transition) — A gap crossed on a repetition — of a word, image, action, sound or syntactic shape — so that the join itself carries meaning. §4.3.
Multiplicity — The practice of making one unit of text discharge several narrative functions at once. Introduced in Chapter 1; applied to connective tissue at §5.
Orientation budget — The chapter’s first principle: every gap imposes a processing cost proportionate to the dimensions it changes, and a transition is the expenditure of narrative material to meet it. A revision instrument, not an aesthetic. §3.7, §16.
Orphaned cut — A hard cut whose anchor never arrives, or arrives after the reader has committed to a false frame. §8.1.
Paralipsis — Genette’s term for the omission of information the adopted focalisation ought to have supplied. The mechanism of the false ellipsis. §3.1, §8.8.
Scene break — The typographic signal that a gap exists: white space, dinkus, ornament, chapter division. Not the transition, which is the narrative material on either side of it. §2.3.
Significance fatigue — What a reader experiences when every join in a book is doing conspicuous double duty: the loss of any plain surface against which emphasis can register. §5.4.
Simultaneity — Two threads occupying the same story time. Prose has no grammatical form for it; readers default to sequence unless told otherwise. §8.10, §7.1 test 8.
Summary bridge — Connective narration that covers the interval itself, and the only technique that can put content in the gap. The natural home of distributed exposition. §4.4.
Time-stamp — An explicit statement of elapsed time or temporal position at the head of a new unit; the cheapest reliable orientation available, and the most commonly defaulted to. §4.2.
Transition — The narrative material, however brief, that carries a reader across a gap in time, place, viewpoint or scale. §2.1.
Transition inventory — The manuscript-scale audit at §5.5: every join listed with its technique, dimension count, anchor position, ellipsis type and second job.