Question

Later topics may assume some knowledge of earlier topics. Should we worry about the order of chapters and of topics within chapters?

Answer 1

Answer: I think contributors should not pay close attention to the order of topics and chapters.

Explanation:

This is a great question, I'm curious to hear what different contributors think about this, so if anyone has an opinion please add it in the comments.

Later topics should definitely assume some knowledge of earlier topics, otherwise every answer would become infinitely long.

As to how much of these underlying concepts should be explained in the question itself, we should discuss that here.

I think contributors should not pay close attention to the order of topics and chapters. There are several reasons for this:

• Most students land directly on a specific question on Socratic from Google, which means they don't have any of the Socratic context
• Many schools teach concepts in different order, so if we expect students to follow the Socratic order, we won't be serving a lot of students as well as we could

I think the right approach is to:

• Identify what earlier topics are required to understand the answer
• State those topics explicitly in the answer and link to topic pages/other questions