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Australian manual of scientific style Start communicating effectively
Large-scale structure
What are the main divisions of a typical text?
When astronomers say ‘large-scale structure’, they are talking about the distribution of galaxies in the universe. We’re not talking about things on quite that large a scale. We’re talking about the largest sections of your document, website, whatever.
At the biggest scale, many projects can be broken into:
- front matter (sometimes called ‘prelims’)
- main matter or ‘body’
- end or back matter (never called ‘postlims’).
While this is not universal, the types of material found in each section will be pretty consistent, whether online or in print.
Actitivy
We’ll go through this in detail on the next few pages, but for now please indicate where you would put various bits of a text – front, main or end matter?
We’ll outline what is usually found in the front, main and end matter in a moment. We say ‘usually’ because these are conventions, not rigid rules. A book designer need not follow them, but it is good practice to only depart from established conventions when there is a good reason.
On a website, ‘front’ and ‘end’ have little meaning. We can still think about whether we need these components, what content they should contain, how the users can most easily find and use them, and what depth and order our headings should have.