First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.

by Joe Moran

When you vary the length of your sentences, two things happen. First, as you fit your thoughts into shorter and longer forms, you come up with better wordings. Second, your writing will, as if by magic, fill with life and voice.

The paragraph belongs to the age of print. Before the printing press there were no paragraphs, although sentences were often divided into groups using some kind of inline typographic marker, like the fleuron or pilcrow. But these marks were fitfully deployed. The arrival of the printed book, and of English prose as a grown-up form, encouraged the use of paragraphs to dispel the monotony of blocks of type.

Bain’s idea of the paragraph as a single developed thought came to rule over the school lesson and composition class. Students were taught that a paragraph should have a topic sentence stating the main idea, supporting sentences that amplified that idea, and a wrap-up sentence revisiting the idea. George Gopen calls this the Wizard of Oz paragraph, with its middle three sentences chanting because, because, because. The trouble with this sort of paragraph is that its life is over by the first sentence and the others are just there to write its obituary.

Just like sentences, paragraphs have shrunk. From the fifteenth century to the turn of the twentieth, the average paragraph length stayed steady at about 300 words. Then, under the influence of newsprint, they got shorter. The thin columns of newspapers needed shorter paragraphs to break up the text into unforbidding chunks. The influence of advertising copy shortened the paragraph still further.

The word paragraph originally meant the paragraph break: it was the pause-providing mark (Greek: graphos) in the margin, beside (para) an unbroken block of text. The break is what matters, and the start and end of a paragraph are where it all happens. You can alter the whole tone of a sentence by moving it from the end of a paragraph to the start of a new one, and vice versa.

Writing that flows is hard work made to look easy. Italians call it sprezzatura: studied carelessness. The word comes from Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 work The Book of the Courtier. Castiglione’s (fictional) courtier defines it as ‘an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them’.