Wikipedia:Narrative flow

Narrative flow is an often overlooked component of good historical and biographical writing. The origins, occurrence, and consequences of an event should be set forth in a way that clearly shows how each element leads into the next. The details of a biographical subject's life should be presented in a way that gives a complete picture of the evolution of their conduct, character, or thinking. Significant gaps in chronological coverage should be accounted for by explaining, where applicable, that an absence of information exists as to those periods. Consideration should be given to the fact that a chronological presentation of a subject's life may appear to give excessive weight to occurrences earlier in their lives, which are not necessarily highly significant to their biography.

Sections

Often, separate sections are created for "criticism" or "controversy", or for "personal life". While there are circumstances where these can be useful, where the subject's personal life or controversies involving them are detached from their basis of notability, placing such materials in a separate section can be harmful to the article if doing so prevents the reader from having a sense of the chronological progression of a subject's life. A good example of integration is Wikipedia's article on Queen Victoria. Both her personal life (marriage and children) and her various controversies are so tied in to her biography that it would render it unintelligible to move those into sections apart from her general chronological narrative.

A separate criticism or controversy section is also likely to disrupt the chronological flow of an article. Readers expect biographical details of a subject's life to be laid out in roughly chronological order. To have an article with a main body laying out a subject's entire life from birth to death (or, in the case of a BLP subject, to the present day), and then to follow that with a description of a controversy from a particular early period in that persons's life can create the false impression that the controversy is the most current aspect of their life, or is more significant to the person's life than other events contained within the main section, or is in some way detached from the events that followed in that person's life. This is particularly problematic where, for example, criticisms made a decade or more ago are presented in the present tense. Editor's also risk giving criticisms and controversies undue weight in the article, making it appear as if these elements are of heightened importance to the individual's life, or even a central aspect of the individual's notability.

As a rule of thumb, if more than half of the text of biographical article (excluding elements such as leading infoboxes and external links and categories at the end) is in sections separate from the main biography, then that material should probably be integrated into the main body of the article. Narrative flow does not, however, require the introduction of synthesis; if sources do not state that a prior event in a person's life influenced their later behavior, editors should not draw the conclusion that it did. It is sufficient to present the facts in their proper chronological order, from which the reader can infer likely relationships.

Small sections

Extremely short sections should be avoided if possible, as they disrupt the narrative flow of the article and disrupt the reader's ability to comprehend the totality of its subject. They also risk, as above, placing an undue emphasis on certain aspects of an individual's life. This is particularly true of "death" sections, for which little information is often available outside of the date, place, and nature of death, as well details of interment. MOS:BODY notes that "Very short or very long sections and subsections in an article look cluttered and inhibit the flow of the prose" and thus, per the guidelines and past consensus, "death" sections should be merged with later life/career sections unless the extent of coverage of the individual's death is sufficient to provide a substantial section within the biography, or the individual's death is a sufficiently significant contributing factor to their notability that drawing attention to it with a separate section would not place undue weight on the event.

"Extremely short" is a subjective judgment, but three substantial paragraphs is a recommended minimum. WP:PARAGRAPHS notes that "One-sentence paragraphs are unusually emphatic, and should be used sparingly"; this should be considered particularly true for one-sentence sections.