"Chapter" vs "Appendix": what's the difference?

[Geoff hart <ghart -at- attcanada -dot- ca>]

Gilda Spitz reports: <<At the moment, most of the books in our documentation 
suite contain several chapters, and at least one appendix. But I'm now starting 
to question whether it's necessary to make the distinction... I decided that 
Troubleshooting should be in an appendix, rather than a chapter. I also created 
an appendix for additional information that was helpful, but not directly a 
description of the tasks in the software. But what's the difference? As long as 
each grouping of information is presented in its own chapter, isn't that 
distinct enough?>>

The origin of the name "appendix" lies that small, poorly understood 
troublemaker in the human abdomen: since nobody knows why it exists, other than 
to cause emergency hospital visits, and since removing it demonstrates that it 
actually serves no useful purpose, people add appendices to books when Those 
Who Make the Decisions insist that the information be included, even if it's 
not useful. <g>

The less interesting explanation for the term is that the word means "something 
appended" (added on at the end), which is the purpose of most appendices: 
providing supplementary information that readers may find useful, but that 
doesn't fit well within the main text (often because, as in the case of a 
mullti-page list of command codes, it would disrupt the flow of the main text). 
In that case, removing the information from the main text and gathering it 
together in one place follows the same principle as creating a table or 
inserting a figure: gather the useful information into one place, move it out 
of the reader's way, but make it readily available on demand.

Why does an appendix go at the end? Because doing so means you could read the 
main chapters sequentially and succeed at what the writer wants you to do 
(i.e., learning the most important points required to achieve a measure of 
proficiency with the product) without ever having to interrupt that process of 
understanding to read information that you simply don't need to know yet. 
Facetiousness notwithstanding, the supplementary information usually isn't 
truly useless, and should be included for the sake of those who will one day 
need it.

So the design decision becomes relatively simple: If the information is crucial 
to understanding, then it's far more useful to integrate it directly into the 
text at a logical point or several logical points. If the information's 
completely useless, delete it entirely. And if it's useful on rare occasions, 
but doesn't need to be read for readers to get all the most important points, 
move it into an Appendix.

--Geoff Hart  ghart -at- netcom -dot- ca
Pointe-Claire, Quebec, Canada
"Most business books are written by consultants and professors who haven't 
spent much time in a cubicle. That's like writing a firsthand account of the 
Donner party based on the fact that you've eaten beef jerky."--Scott Adams, The 
Dilbert Principle



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