Appendices fail when they become attics. Our prose lab asks authors to treat each appendix as a chapbook with its own thesis sentence. If Appendix B cannot answer “what decision does this enable?” it gets merged or cut.
We also enforce a “no surprise nouns” rule: if a subsystem nickname appears for the first time on page eleven, the reader is allowed to throw a virtual tomato. Cohorts practice reading aloud while mentors track confusion spikes—tiny eyebrow raises count.
Finally, we recommend shipping two PDFs: one annotated for operators with stack snippets, and one redacted for wider circulation. The second PDF forces writers to confront which details are genuinely load-bearing. The cohort homework is merciless but short: compress a twelve-page draft to six without losing causal links.