Paragraphs And You
Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2020 10:39 pm
Howdy, folks! I'm making this its own topic so it gets a bit more visibility than throwing it into the general discussion thread or slapping it onto the end of my giant article thing. It centers on a little topic that's been mildly getting my goat in V7 for a while, because it flies in opposition to the general site trend. The topic is simple: paragraphs.
When I say that this topic flies in opposition to the general trend, I refer to the (much appreciated) trend towards grammatical correctness and proper mechanics. SOTF has come a long way from the days when someone would jam out a post at 3 AM on a flip phone's keyboard, not hit the shift key at any point, not bother to read over it, and call it a day. Nowadays, most posts have few to no typos, care is put into word choice and sentence structure, and there's a general feeling of pride in the craft of writing.
And yet, so many people do paragraphs wrong.
At its core, a paragraph is a unit of text, typically devoted to one idea. There are a lot of pieces of conventional wisdom about them—in middle school, my teachers said they should ideally be three to eight sentences in length—but as with most rules of thumb in writing, that can be a bit wiggly. The important thing to bear in mind is that paragraphs form units in a reader's mind, distinct pieces of the overall whole of a post, and that this actually informs the process of reading.
Generally speaking, a good paragraph makes a post flow smoothly and elegantly. A bad one can make a post choppy or too dense, and detract from the reading experience. There are a lot of things that can make a paragraph good or bad, but I'm going to focus on the two I see most frequently messed up: length and dialogue.
First, length. This is the factor that is most important to ease and speed of reading. It is something that does allow for some variation due to personal style and preference, but I feel like most often handlers aren't using super dense or light paragraphs for a purpose, but out of a lack of understanding of other options.
A light paragraph is one that's small—one sentence beats, a line or two of text, brief asides, etc. These are quick, breezy paragraphs that lend themselves to fast reading and rapid progress through the post. On a physical level, they make the post look longer than it actually is, while still flowing quickly. Used well, they make the reading experience smooth and pleasant, and provide moments of serious emphasis. Used poorly, they make posts samey and fail to disguise a lack of actual content.
As an example, I've split up the start of this very rant into a paragraph-light approach that's still vaguely correct on the barest of technical levels but is still inferior:
As you can see, this adds roughly half again the page space taken up by the text (depending on your screen resolution), but also dilutes some of the meaning. The grouping of ideas is lost, as each sentence is afforded equal unique emphasis and privilege. This makes oomph moments—like, say, the "And yet, so many people do paragraphs wrong." of the original—utterly impossible and ineffective; they blend with everything else and the whole thing has the same tone and mood. If you tend towards a lighter style almost every post, I would challenge you to consider whether your paragraphs might be better off combined in some cases, and whether in others the points being made might not benefit from a little more writing behind them to elaborate and expand.
Dense paragraphs, meanwhile, are really, really long. At their best, they stand out from the rest of a post and convey a single moment/idea/train of thought that grows until it seems to encompass everything. They slow reading down, make it more difficult, and compress posts a bit so they don't seem as long. This is usually a bad thing, though—are you trying to make your stuff difficult to read? Are you trying to encourage people to skim? If so, do you have a very good reason? If not, break your paragraphs up!
I harp more on overly-heavy paragraphs than overly-light ones, because while light ones are likely more common, they're also far less obnoxious to slog through, and thus less destructive to an ongoing narrative or a post's quality. As before, I'm using the start of this very piece to illustrate:
Wasn't that miserable to read? Yes, the whole thing is more or less on one topic—paragraphs and SOTF's often doing them wrong—but with no breathers and no distinction of components it's very difficult to figure out where the emphasis lies and to hold all the information. It levels the playing field like an overly-light paragraph does, but instead of making everything seem of utmost importance it makes nothing important.
If you skew towards heavy paragraphs as default, I challenge you to look for breakpoints and chop things up a little, and to consider if no such points are apparent whether you might not be wallowing in redundancy just a bit.
To give one of those wiggly, not at all one-size-fits-all rules: If you're not trying anything specific with a paragraph, aim for three to six sentences. The longer your sentences, the fewer you need (and if you go way long or way short, adjust accordingly). Keep your paragraph to one idea, or to one facet of one idea if your idea is really big (this is why five-paragraph essays in school are not one-long-paragraph essays).
If you want to isolate one point for emphasis, let it stand alone.
If you have something denser and pricklier, a different approach is called for. Some ideas require an in-depth explanation and a lot of focus. Sometimes you're trying to convey a character's twisting, chaotic, ongoing thought process. Sometimes you're trying to drive home that a speech is really dull. Sometimes you want to isolate a piece of a post for a different type of emphasis—an oomph that cannot be reduced to one punchy moment, but rather that tracks a build in escalation and intensity. These moments should be rare—after all, any trick loses effectiveness if it's relied upon nonstop, and that goes for the light sharp points of emphasis just as much as it does the dense heavy ones—but I certainly don't mean to suggest that they don't exist. In these cases, you can employ the long, heavy, winding paragraphs... just make sure to do so with an awareness that they are by default alienating and difficult for readers, and with an understanding that in using them you are potentially undercutting your own words and points.
That's about it for paragraph size. Fortunately, the next topic is a whole lot easier: dialogue.
When a character starts talking, you start a new paragraph. Always. Every single time. There are faint exceptions but they're uncommon enough that if you don't know this rule already you shouldn't be worrying about them, because starting a new paragraph for dialogue is always right and not doing so is almost always wrong. Failing to start a new paragraph when your character starts speaking makes for an absolutely miserable reading experience and it's on the rise on SOTF and if you do it you should stop right now because you are almost certainly objectively incorrect by the rules of English style and grammar.
If it helps, imagine that every time you hit the quotation mark for the first time in more than two sentences, it comes wrapped up with an Enter input first. Make a macro that forces you to undo line-breaks before quotation marks if you have to. It'll be just as much work, but where it goes wrong the results will be more obvious in their error.
In fact, dialogue pacing and punctuation are such big deals that for a lot of more avant-garde writers, quotation marks have become optional (see, for example, Fight Club). If you know how to break up and attribute text, you can communicate most ideas and speech without falling back on them, just by using other mechanics properly.
I'm grabbing a random post of mine from V4 to butcher for the sake of example:
See how it's really hard to tell when Aaron's starting talking in the second? Bonus points because one of the edge cases for not paragraph breaking before quotation marks is when the quotation marks are not denoting actual dialogue, but sarcasm/slang/imagined discourse.
Every time someone new starts speaking, make a new paragraph. Every time. Always. If your character stops speaking for more than a sentence or two of quick narration, also start a new paragraph. If there are multiple pauses within the speech for narrative, you should go with a bunch of quick paragraphs and not one big ugly blocky one unless you have this stuff so down you've been rolling your eyes through this entire screed going thinking to yourself "How basic" and can tell what the difference is between the quotation marks right before these words and dialogue in narrative without even thinking about it. Bonus points if you know what I did wrong with regard to commas.
And one last little thing, while we're at it (and whoops this is a bit of a staff call-out 'cause it's most prominent when y'all do it wrong every announcement and it grinds my gears):
If dialogue continues for more than one paragraph without a break for narrative, you signal this by leaving off the closing quotation marks until the speech ends. Close quotes mean the speaker has stopped speaking and the next sentence is either narration or belongs to someone else. It does not just mean the paragraph is over; that's what breaking paragraphs is for.
Once again, this isn't a stylistic choice or whatever. This is like talking about your party rouge in D&D, or saying how you're parents are taking there dogs to the grocery store because their sure its nicer they're but your not convinced. Please don't do it; it makes English majors alternately weep and cackle in mad glee as they reach for the red pen of doom.
So that's the basics of paragraphs and how to make me (and most other readers, whether they realize consciously or not) not gnash their teeth while trying to get through your stuff. Gonna cross-post this to my ramble thread in a bit, but for now leaving it here alone, and am down to talk other grammar stuff, etc. Have at.
When I say that this topic flies in opposition to the general trend, I refer to the (much appreciated) trend towards grammatical correctness and proper mechanics. SOTF has come a long way from the days when someone would jam out a post at 3 AM on a flip phone's keyboard, not hit the shift key at any point, not bother to read over it, and call it a day. Nowadays, most posts have few to no typos, care is put into word choice and sentence structure, and there's a general feeling of pride in the craft of writing.
And yet, so many people do paragraphs wrong.
At its core, a paragraph is a unit of text, typically devoted to one idea. There are a lot of pieces of conventional wisdom about them—in middle school, my teachers said they should ideally be three to eight sentences in length—but as with most rules of thumb in writing, that can be a bit wiggly. The important thing to bear in mind is that paragraphs form units in a reader's mind, distinct pieces of the overall whole of a post, and that this actually informs the process of reading.
Generally speaking, a good paragraph makes a post flow smoothly and elegantly. A bad one can make a post choppy or too dense, and detract from the reading experience. There are a lot of things that can make a paragraph good or bad, but I'm going to focus on the two I see most frequently messed up: length and dialogue.
First, length. This is the factor that is most important to ease and speed of reading. It is something that does allow for some variation due to personal style and preference, but I feel like most often handlers aren't using super dense or light paragraphs for a purpose, but out of a lack of understanding of other options.
A light paragraph is one that's small—one sentence beats, a line or two of text, brief asides, etc. These are quick, breezy paragraphs that lend themselves to fast reading and rapid progress through the post. On a physical level, they make the post look longer than it actually is, while still flowing quickly. Used well, they make the reading experience smooth and pleasant, and provide moments of serious emphasis. Used poorly, they make posts samey and fail to disguise a lack of actual content.
As an example, I've split up the start of this very rant into a paragraph-light approach that's still vaguely correct on the barest of technical levels but is still inferior:
As you can see, this adds roughly half again the page space taken up by the text (depending on your screen resolution), but also dilutes some of the meaning. The grouping of ideas is lost, as each sentence is afforded equal unique emphasis and privilege. This makes oomph moments—like, say, the "And yet, so many people do paragraphs wrong." of the original—utterly impossible and ineffective; they blend with everything else and the whole thing has the same tone and mood. If you tend towards a lighter style almost every post, I would challenge you to consider whether your paragraphs might be better off combined in some cases, and whether in others the points being made might not benefit from a little more writing behind them to elaborate and expand.
Dense paragraphs, meanwhile, are really, really long. At their best, they stand out from the rest of a post and convey a single moment/idea/train of thought that grows until it seems to encompass everything. They slow reading down, make it more difficult, and compress posts a bit so they don't seem as long. This is usually a bad thing, though—are you trying to make your stuff difficult to read? Are you trying to encourage people to skim? If so, do you have a very good reason? If not, break your paragraphs up!
I harp more on overly-heavy paragraphs than overly-light ones, because while light ones are likely more common, they're also far less obnoxious to slog through, and thus less destructive to an ongoing narrative or a post's quality. As before, I'm using the start of this very piece to illustrate:
Wasn't that miserable to read? Yes, the whole thing is more or less on one topic—paragraphs and SOTF's often doing them wrong—but with no breathers and no distinction of components it's very difficult to figure out where the emphasis lies and to hold all the information. It levels the playing field like an overly-light paragraph does, but instead of making everything seem of utmost importance it makes nothing important.
If you skew towards heavy paragraphs as default, I challenge you to look for breakpoints and chop things up a little, and to consider if no such points are apparent whether you might not be wallowing in redundancy just a bit.
To give one of those wiggly, not at all one-size-fits-all rules: If you're not trying anything specific with a paragraph, aim for three to six sentences. The longer your sentences, the fewer you need (and if you go way long or way short, adjust accordingly). Keep your paragraph to one idea, or to one facet of one idea if your idea is really big (this is why five-paragraph essays in school are not one-long-paragraph essays).
If you want to isolate one point for emphasis, let it stand alone.
If you have something denser and pricklier, a different approach is called for. Some ideas require an in-depth explanation and a lot of focus. Sometimes you're trying to convey a character's twisting, chaotic, ongoing thought process. Sometimes you're trying to drive home that a speech is really dull. Sometimes you want to isolate a piece of a post for a different type of emphasis—an oomph that cannot be reduced to one punchy moment, but rather that tracks a build in escalation and intensity. These moments should be rare—after all, any trick loses effectiveness if it's relied upon nonstop, and that goes for the light sharp points of emphasis just as much as it does the dense heavy ones—but I certainly don't mean to suggest that they don't exist. In these cases, you can employ the long, heavy, winding paragraphs... just make sure to do so with an awareness that they are by default alienating and difficult for readers, and with an understanding that in using them you are potentially undercutting your own words and points.
That's about it for paragraph size. Fortunately, the next topic is a whole lot easier: dialogue.
When a character starts talking, you start a new paragraph. Always. Every single time. There are faint exceptions but they're uncommon enough that if you don't know this rule already you shouldn't be worrying about them, because starting a new paragraph for dialogue is always right and not doing so is almost always wrong. Failing to start a new paragraph when your character starts speaking makes for an absolutely miserable reading experience and it's on the rise on SOTF and if you do it you should stop right now because you are almost certainly objectively incorrect by the rules of English style and grammar.
If it helps, imagine that every time you hit the quotation mark for the first time in more than two sentences, it comes wrapped up with an Enter input first. Make a macro that forces you to undo line-breaks before quotation marks if you have to. It'll be just as much work, but where it goes wrong the results will be more obvious in their error.
In fact, dialogue pacing and punctuation are such big deals that for a lot of more avant-garde writers, quotation marks have become optional (see, for example, Fight Club). If you know how to break up and attribute text, you can communicate most ideas and speech without falling back on them, just by using other mechanics properly.
I'm grabbing a random post of mine from V4 to butcher for the sake of example:
See how it's really hard to tell when Aaron's starting talking in the second? Bonus points because one of the edge cases for not paragraph breaking before quotation marks is when the quotation marks are not denoting actual dialogue, but sarcasm/slang/imagined discourse.
Every time someone new starts speaking, make a new paragraph. Every time. Always. If your character stops speaking for more than a sentence or two of quick narration, also start a new paragraph. If there are multiple pauses within the speech for narrative, you should go with a bunch of quick paragraphs and not one big ugly blocky one unless you have this stuff so down you've been rolling your eyes through this entire screed going thinking to yourself "How basic" and can tell what the difference is between the quotation marks right before these words and dialogue in narrative without even thinking about it. Bonus points if you know what I did wrong with regard to commas.
And one last little thing, while we're at it (and whoops this is a bit of a staff call-out 'cause it's most prominent when y'all do it wrong every announcement and it grinds my gears):
If dialogue continues for more than one paragraph without a break for narrative, you signal this by leaving off the closing quotation marks until the speech ends. Close quotes mean the speaker has stopped speaking and the next sentence is either narration or belongs to someone else. It does not just mean the paragraph is over; that's what breaking paragraphs is for.
Once again, this isn't a stylistic choice or whatever. This is like talking about your party rouge in D&D, or saying how you're parents are taking there dogs to the grocery store because their sure its nicer they're but your not convinced. Please don't do it; it makes English majors alternately weep and cackle in mad glee as they reach for the red pen of doom.
So that's the basics of paragraphs and how to make me (and most other readers, whether they realize consciously or not) not gnash their teeth while trying to get through your stuff. Gonna cross-post this to my ramble thread in a bit, but for now leaving it here alone, and am down to talk other grammar stuff, etc. Have at.
