Thinking in Paragraphs
Thoughts cannot be measured in units. The very nature of thought is abstract, its translation into words, imperfect. And yet we must live in the imperfect world of imperfect words by which we attempt to construct our thoughts and deliver them to others.
Though thoughts cannot be measured in units, words (and the structures we make of them) can. The organization of words is a very human business, and it is the foundation of most other forms of human business. Communication is a human necessity.
This is a very lofty start to an essay about paragraphs. It’s hard not to be self-conscious writing about paragraphs, a topic I worry will fail to interest other people. Done well, paragraphs tend to recede into the background, unnoticed. Like a room with good light, they exist to contain and display. Beautiful paragraphs set off their contents, often without obtruding. Writing about paragraphs forces attention to them and, as with any craft essay, invites critique. Oh, well. I’m still going to do it because I think paragraphs are important.
Since paragraphs are not usually meant to obtrude, it can be difficult to immediately grasp their importance. Learning to think in paragraphs is one of the biggest hurdles in moving from high-school writing to higher level writing. High-school writers, as a group, tend to think in words, or maybe sentences. The five-paragraph essay form, which often treats each body paragraph as a discreet unit, buttresses this approach. When forced by the syllabus to write more than one draft, the tendency among high-school writers is to look for specific words they can replace or sentences they can polish.
These are honorable tasks, ones that professional writers perform as well. But they are comparatively low-level concerns next to the shape of an argument or narrative. A paper without an argument can have lovely, elegant sentences with words carefully chosen and polished to a high degree of shine, and still say nothing—or worse, say something untrue. (Hello to several prominent op-ed writers!)
At the other end of the spectrum, while it is important to keep the overarching claims and intentions in mind, the work of the argument/story/reporting happens at the paragraph level, and neglect of the form will result in an argument or narrative that is difficult to parse. If your intended readers can’t understand your great ideas, their greatness doesn’t matter all that much.
The two most obvious paragraph flops come in the stultifying block of unbroken writing or the jerky rhythm of a series of one-sentence paragraphs. You’ve surely encountered both at times. A page loads on your screen and you stare in horror at the immense slab of text in front of you and quietly close the tab. Or you open your email to find a chirpy LinkedIn influencer has sent you a newsletter full of cheery, choppy inspirational sentences, each with its own dedicated white space. Live, laugh, leverage, bestie!
Both the block and the choppy paragraph are bad design. If a text is a building, then the wall of text is a building with a single huge room. The acoustics are terrible, the space is poorly used, and the layout creates overwhelm and frustration. The one-sentence paragraph essay is its equal and inefficient opposite. There’s a room for even the smallest functions, but every room is tiny and too specialized. The stove is in one room and the fridge in another. In both instances, the purpose of the space hasn’t been properly considered.
A good paragraph is one you know to be useful and believe to be beautiful.[1] It considers how information is grouped and to what end. This will result in paragraphs of differing lengths, each formed around a specific idea and leading naturally to the next idea.
Just as varying sentences in length will help with flow, so too will varying paragraphs. I was taught in elementary school that a paragraph required a minimum of three sentences to be a paragraph. Lies. A paragraph requires the number of sentences that will best serve its purpose and its audience. Sometimes a paragraph is one sentence, or even one word. At other times, it fills the page, consciously and intentionally overwhelming the reader, making its point at length, demanding deliberate and careful attention.
That deliberate and careful attention should begin with the author.
Without care and attention, it is shockingly easy to write a text with ideas that are connected in the author’s brain, but not on the page. Those mental gaps are filled in by the author’s foreknowledge of their own intent; the jump from point A to point C is seamless for the person who understands what they’re about. The reader, alas, needs a clear layout to follow the narrative.
If paragraphs are rooms, transitions are intermediary spaces like hallways and doorways. Without them, it’s hard to get in or to see the logic of a given layout. Transitions consciously connect ideas and show why they are in conjunction to the preceding and succeeding paragraphs.
A text, like a building, can have all the right parts, but if the layout isn’t considered, if the front door opens into the bathroom or the elevator in an office building is far from the entrance, that space is going to confuse or alienate visitors. Paragraphs should not just be well composed in themselves, but well composed in relation to one another. A good paragraph is a form of accessibility. Let readers in.
[1] Apologies to William Morris.