"a linear progress" is a perfectly acceptable phrase in written English.
It describes something which moves forward in a direct, consistent way. For example, "With hard work and dedication, she made a linear progress in her studies."
Runners, rowers and cyclists have a linear progress; they know where it's going.
"It then switches to 1938 by which time the complacent Mrs Conway's income is shrinking and her children are facing reality... Finally, Priestley takes us back to 1919 to show the seeds of the family's destruction but also to prove that time is not a linear progress but an abstract concept containing past, present and future".
Elite marathon race times showed a linear progress from 18-35 years and started to increase in a curvilinear manner at the age of ~35 years.
Rather than presenting science as a linear progress, both auto- and hetero-biographical sources inform us about flashes of intuition, lucky breaks, missed opportunities and fatal turns (Beckwith 2002; Graham 2004).
An interesting finding was that the sex difference was lowest at the age of ~49 years and was higher in younger and older ages than ~49 years although the elite marathon race times showed a rather linear progress from 18 to 35 years.
Scott's new book extends these ideas into the deep past, and draws on existing research to argue that ours is not a story of linear progress, that the time line is much more complicated, and that the causal sequences of the standard version are wrong.
To say that the army's power is declining indicates "a comfortable assumption of linear progress, where democracy and the politicians are gaining ground," comments William Hale, a British analyst; that is not entirely accurate, he says.In truth the army is strong whenever the civilian government is weak, or when danger threatens.
But maybe pop's narrative isn't a simple one of linear progress or decline.
It's perhaps also problematic to talk in terms of levels like beginner, intermediate and advanced — which sets up an expectation of smooth, linear progress.
This going through and beyond, moreover, would not simply be a matter of going further down the road of linear progress; it would entail a hermeneutical as well as ultimately a (me)ontological and existential re-gress, a radical "step back".
In his hands, the waterways' halting but inexorable linear progress finds not just a description but also an analogy in the frame-by-frame movement of film.
