{"id":45868,"date":"2018-11-05T11:14:47","date_gmt":"2018-11-05T19:14:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=45868"},"modified":"2018-11-05T11:14:47","modified_gmt":"2018-11-05T19:14:47","slug":"getting-to-grips-with-the-paragraph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/getting-to-grips-with-the-paragraph\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting to grips with \u2018the paragraph\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

I was recently asked how I felt about paragraphs. \u201cWell you know, all the feels\u201d I might have replied. But I didn\u2019t, largely because I don\u2019t usually think about the paragraph. The question made me wonder whether I take the paragraph for granted.<\/p>\n

Paragraphs sit way below my consciousness a lot of the time. But paragraph awareness rises to the surface when I am reading something where the writer doesn\u2019t appear know what the paragraph is. I pay attention to paragraphs when I expect to see them and they aren\u2019t there. I notice their absence rather than their presence.<\/p>\n

A caveat. I don\u2019t expect to see a paragraph if I am reading a text intended to break the conventional academic prose mould. Something that is written evocatively, or as a montage or as prose poetry or as a stream of consciousness. It would be silly to expect deliberately \u2018artful\u2019 prose to follow the same conventions as your \u2018standard\u2019 academic English. Nor do I expect to see paragraphs of a uniform length. Paragraphs can be of varying lengths, even, on occasions, single sentences.<\/p>\n

But I am\u00a0always<\/em>\u00a0jolted when I see a page \u2013 or more \u2013 of academic writing that isn\u2019t broken up somehow. Broken up into, yes, paragraphs.<\/p>\n

So what is it about the mega-paragraph that alarms me?<\/p>\n

Well, it\u2019s not simply that it\u2019s easier for the reader -me \u2013 to engage with the writer\u2019s ideas if the prose is subdivided. \u00a0That\u2019s certainly true. But I also get concerned because I have come to associate the monster paragraph, particularly in academic writing, with a muddle of ideas.<\/p>\n

As a frequent reader of theses and academic papers, I understand that an over-inflated paragraph isn\u2019t usually the result of a writing problem. It\u2019s not that writers don\u2019t know the basic principles of composition. That they haven\u2019t a clue what a paragraph is. Well, yes, occasionally that might be the case. But more often than not, the swollen and distended paragraph comes from a writer who doesn\u2019t quite know what they are trying to say.<\/p>\n

The elongated paragraph very often signals a writer not yet able to choreograph the development of an overall idea. We might say that lengthy paragraph writers have a thinking-writing \u2013 not a technical-writing \u2013 problem.<\/p>\n

Puffed up paragraph writers have got all of their stuff together, but they don\u2019t yet know which of the bits they\u2019ve accumulated are more important than others. They don\u2019t yet know what order the bits should come in. They can\u2019t construct the steps which lead the reader through their argument. They have no\u00a0red thread,<\/a>\u00a0as my Nordic colleagues would say.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s each one of the steps which should constitute each one of the paragraphs. Every separate paragraph is a move towards the overall idea.<\/p>\n

The most common way to think about the paragraphs used in academic argument is to see them as made up of three elements:<\/p>\n