Descend one level of abstraction

Statements in a method should be one level of abstraction below the method itself. Correspondingly, they should all be on the same level of abstraction.

METHOD create_and_publish.
  post = create_post( user_input ).
  post->publish( ).
ENDMETHOD.

instead of confusing mixtures of low level (trim, to_upper, …) and high level (publish, …) concepts like

" anti-pattern
METHOD create_and_publish.
  post = NEW blog_post( ).
  DATA(user_name) = trim( to_upper( sy-uname ) ).
  post->set_author( user_name ).
  post->publish( ).
ENDMETHOD.

A reliable way to find out what the right level of abstraction is is this: Let the method’s author explain what the method does in few, short words, without looking at the code. The bullets (s)he numbers are the sub-methods the method should call or the statements it should execute.