You can read my new article ‘The architecture of coherence: Applying Christopher Alexander’s ‘levels of scale’ concept to non-fiction books’ here.
Below is a summary of the article:
- Common reader struggles: Readers of non-fiction often feel overwhelmed by detail, forget material they’ve read earlier, get disorientated within chapters, and struggle to recover the gist of books they revisit.
- Underlying cause: These struggles arise from the difficulty of perceiving how the parts of a book relate to its whole.
- Architectural analogy: Christopher Alexander faced the same issue in architecture and proposed the Levels of Scale concept to explain how coherence makes buildings “alive”.
- Notre-Dame vs a high-rise building: Notre-Dame Cathedral illustrates many nested levels of scale, moving from stained glass pieces up to the facade as a whole, creating coherence and richness. A modern high-rise, with a limited structure of windows–floors–whole, lacks this complexity and vitality.
- Application to books: Books, like buildings, benefit from displaying coherence across multiple levels: paragraphs, sections, chapters, and the book as a whole.
- Visible vs invisible coherence: In architecture, coherence can be seen directly. With non-fiction books, coherence must be described by the author and/or constructed by the reader, since readers cannot perceive the whole at a glance.
- Defining coherence: Beyond being logical and consistent, coherence in books means creating a unified whole that operates across meaning, structure and the relationship of the parts to the whole.
- Levels in books: Books have a minimum of four levels (paragraphs, chapter sections, chapters, whole book), with possible additions (chapter sub-sections, parts).
- Current shortcomings: Many non-fiction books only partially solve the problem of coherence by adding contents lists, chapter sections and parts. But these are not enough to fully address the struggles of many readers.
- Designing for coherence: Just as buildings must be designed to embody coherence, so authors should deliberately design books to ensure that coherence is perceptible at every level of scale.
- Four devices that enhance coherence:
- Summaries: they help readers grasp the whole quickly (Christopher Alexander modelled this in The Timeless Way of Building).
- Content structure maps: diagrams showing how the parts of a book or individual chapters fit together (Oliver Lovell provides powerful examples).
- Argument structure maps: diagrams that clarify the logic of complex arguments (Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World provides an excellent example).
- Explaining deeper links: drawing out cross-chapter or cross-section insights that authors often leave implicit.
- Reader benefits: When authors use these devices, readers are better able to (a) quickly grasp the big picture, (b) easily refresh their memory after a break, (c) stay oriented within chapters, and (d) rapidly recover the essence of a previously read book. When coherence is made explicit, non-fiction books become more understandable, more memorable, and easier to navigate and reuse.
