post of little interest to anyone except possibly ursule.

I have a recipe for writing papers that has served me quite well over the last four years. It allows me to pick a topic and churn out a ~15 page paper in about 4 weeks from start to finish; this includes doing all relevant background reading. However, the recipe is not entirely unproblematic, and as I follow it currently, I think I have identified two struggle points:

- When to introduce the formal language.
- When to introduce the implicit principles.

Both of these have the same issues: On the one hand, I keep hoping to arrange the paper such that the formal language is introduced in its entirety, and then it is applied to the specific problem I am dealing with. Likewise, a sense of decorum in me wants me to make explicit all of the implicit principles first, and then just refer back to them in the cases where they are used.

However, awkwardness arises in terms of justification. If I introduce the language and the implicit principles before I discuss the justification for my choice of language or for why I believe the implicit principles exist/are being used, then the end result seems sort of mystifying: Why these principles? Why this language? How did the author (a reader might wonder) come up with these? Yet if I try to discuss the justifications first, then I end up introducing both the principles and the language piecemeal, which is both frustrating, potentially unclear, and inelegant.

Worse, if I discuss the implicit principles before I've introduced the formal language, then I have to write them again, in the formal language, once the language has been introduced, and this seems needlessly duplicative. But since the justification for the formal language often consists in the necessity of being able to express concepts used in the implicit principles, if the justification is to come before the introduction, then I have to put the implicit principles first.

I feel like I'm stuck in a sort of vicious circle that I'm never quite sure how to get out of. Often times I just impale myself on one of the horns, and deal with the consequences, but I'm never entirely happy with the result.

This is probably not a situation that anyone reading this journal usually finds themselves in, with perhaps the exception of ursule, but if anyone has any advice, I'd appreciate it.