grammaticality - "This chapter, and the following chapters in this section" — singular or plural?

I have some technical documentation that has the phrase:

This chapters describes how to...

And I need to upgrade it to refer to the current and following chapters. What is the correct English phrase to use?

This chapter, and the following chapters in this section, describes how to...

or:

This chapter, and the following chapters in this section, describe how to...

In other words, is the thing doing the describing a multitude of chapters (that would "describe" something), or are the multitude considered a single item here (needing "describes")?

Or, are both phrases wrong?

Answer

There is no need to repeat "chapters":

"This and the following chapters describe how to ..."

Plural verb agrees with the compound subject in this case.

There's a good segment on compound subject verb agreement here:

http://www.towson.edu/ows/moduleSVAGR.htm

If you need to include information about the section, then you can get away with something like:

"In this section, this and the following chapters describe how to ..."

If you like, you can get away from the use of "in this section" altogether by doing something like:

"This chapter through chapter 15 describes how to ..."

Oddly, the singular verb seems to agree here since now it is a single subject--a nounal phrase which operates as a collection--rather than a compound subject. It is like saying:

"This collection of chapters describes how to ..."