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Section (typography)

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Open pages of the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, showing an ornate section break on the lower left page created from asterisks. It is used to signal a pause for the reader and a transition in the narrative.

In books and documents, a section is a subdivision, especially of a chapter.[1][2]

In fiction, sections often represent scenes, and accordingly the space separating them is sometimes also called a scene break.[3] Scene breaks represent gaps in story time that do not correspond to discourse time, and thus reveal the story-discourse distinction.[4]

In law, sections are divisions of legislation that may be deeply nested to as little as single sentences.[5]

Section form and numbering

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Some documents, especially legal documents, may have numbered sections, such as Section Two of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or Internal Revenue Code section 183.[5] The symbol § (section sign) prefixed to a number indicates that it is the number of a section detailed elsewhere.[6]

The dotted-decimal section-numbering scheme commonly used in scientific and technical documents is defined by International Standard ISO 2145.[7][8]

In HTML

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The <section> tag may be used in semantic HTML to mark part of a webpage as a section.[9]

The <hr/> element originally represented a page-width horizontal rule, and now has the semantics of a "paragraph-level thematic break" which may be rendered in various ways.[10] In the Wikipedia markup language, it is represented as {{Hr}} and renders like this:

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Definition of SECTION". www.merriam-webster.com. 2024-10-27. Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  2. ^ "Section Definition & Meaning | Britannica Dictionary". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  3. ^ Williamson, Jill. "Section Breaks vs. Scene Breaks | Go Teen Writers". Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  4. ^ Shen, Dan (2003). "What Do Temporal Antinomies Do to the Story-Discourse Distinction?: A Reply to Brian Richardson's Response". Narrative. 11 (2): 237–241. doi:10.1353/nar.2003.0010. ISSN 1538-974X.
  5. ^ a b Bruce, Thomas Robert (2008-08-29). "Section identifiers (LII)". LII / Legal Informtion Institute. Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  6. ^ Standler, Ronald M. (2004). "Legal Research and Citation Style in USA". Retrieved 2009-12-15.
  7. ^ Kowalski, E. (3 June 2008). "Peano paragraphing". blogs.ethz.ch. Retrieved 3 November 2024.
  8. ^ "International Standard ISO 2145:1978, Documentation – Numbering of divisions and subdivisions in written documents". Geneva: International Organization for Standardization. (paywalled)
  9. ^ "The Generic Section element - HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN". developer.mozilla.org. 2024-08-01. Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  10. ^ "hr – thematic break (CHANGED) - HTML5". HTML: The Markup Language (an HTML language reference)--W3C Working Draft. 11 October 2012. Retrieved 2026-02-04.