In this invited Afterword Matthiessen positions this volume as the third step in a series of books introducing students and colleagues to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) – following on from the general introduction in Matthiessen and Halliday (1997/2009) and the introduction to formulating system networks in Martin, Wang and Zhu (2013). It also positions the work on English, Spanish and Chinese in this volume in relation to work on other languages, much of which has been curated and/or mentored by Matthiessen. In addition this afterword reviews a number of key issues arising in relation to language description based on SFL. These include the paradigmatic orientation of system descriptions, cryptogrammatical reasoning, trinocular vision (from about, from roundabout and from below), metafunction (ideational, interpersonal and textual), rank and functional language typology.