[I]t is a bit of outstanding that the treatises on rhetoric have been so sluggish in coming to notice the natural significance of the paragraph: that the idea of the lecturers was so a few years behind the follow of the writers.
Edwin Herbert Lewis, A Historical past of the English Paragraph (1894)
[T]right here is not any such factor as a paragraph. That’s, there isn’t any merchandise in a top level view, no department of a tree, no unit of discourse that constantly corresponds to a block of textual content delimited by a clean line or an indentation.
Steven Pinker, The Sense of Type (2015)
What’s a paragraph? Seek the advice of a writing information, and you’ll obtain a solution like this: “A paragraph is a bunch of sentences that develops one central thought.” Nevertheless stable such a definition seems on the web page, it rapidly melts within the warmth of stay instruction, as any writing trainer will let you know. Confronted with the duty of assembling their very own paragraphs, college students discover practically each phrase within the method problematic. What number of sentences belong within the “group?” Someplace alongside the way in which, many have been taught that 5 – 6 will do. However then on the market on this planet, they’ve seen (or heard rumors of) bulkier and slimmer specimens, some spilling over pages, some consisting of a single sentence. And the way does one go about “creating” a central thought? Is there a magic variety of subpoints or citations? Most problematic of all is the notion of the primary “thought” itself. What qualifies? Details? Propositions? Your concepts? Another person’s?
In his 1928 English Prose Type, the poet and artwork critic Herbert Learn argued that there’s no level in fussing in regards to the “obscure” notion of a central “thought” anyway, because it “shall be discovered of little utility to the paragraphs we discover in literature,” a declare that Learn illustrates with unruly precedents from Thomas Babington Macaulay, John Milton, and D.H. Lawrence, amongst others. What Learn clarifies is just not solely that single-minded definitions buckle underneath even minimal stress. Taking on his practically century-old guide, one acknowledges a peculiar custom through which one textbook after one other, one era after one other, has promoted a blueprint for paragraph development conspicuously at odds with the prose of essentially the most extremely acclaimed stylists of the English language.
What provides? The strain displays the paragraph’s curious historical past as a punctuation mark and unit of thought. The truth is, my opening query—what’s a paragraph?—solely will get extra difficult as we gaze additional and additional into the previous, because the paragraph steadily dwindles to a skinny line within the margins. This backstory explains why it’s so exhausting to say what precisely a paragraph is and, in flip, why we battle now to legislate its parameters. However this isn’t a wholly despairing story: To recall the paragraph’s previous lives can also be to contemplate how earlier generations have put their ideas so as and to realize thereby a vantage to rethink our personal writing practices.
The difficulty begins with the traditional Greeks. Their scribes—and later their Roman imitators—laid out paperwork in columns on papyrus bookrolls (a.okay.a. scrolls) utilizing a way often called scriptio continua through which phrases are written with out areas in between. The classicist William Johnson has memorably likened the impact to “a good phalanx of clear, distinct letters, every marching one after the opposite to kind an impression of steady stream.” However scriptio continua poses an apparent problem: The reader should type the marching characters into significant phrases and sentences. Unsurprisingly, scribes and readers over the centuries invented marking programs to help the reader’s labors of understanding and, equally necessary, vivid articulation—studying being very a lot an oral efficiency in antiquity.
The primary such mark—in use from the fourth-century BCE on—was a plain horizontal stroke drawn within the margin alongside or maybe barely intruding between traces of the textual content. This paragraphos (actually, “written beside”) has been known as “the primary punctuation mark,” although it possible wouldn’t go muster with trendy grade faculty lecturers as a result of it didn’t have a constant grammatical or rhetorical operate. It signified merely {that a} transition of some variety would happen within the neighboring line—maybe the start of a brand new sentence or stanza, maybe a change of speaker in a drama or Platonic dialogue. Typophile Keith Houston has rightly known as the paragraphos a “crude instrument.” Its pliability, although, made it eminently helpful.
As a mark of change, the paragraphos was a well-known system within the scribal arsenal—together with methods akin to outdenting, enlarging letters, and leaving empty house— for figuring out subsections of texts, together with people who conform to our sense of paragraph-scale. Nevertheless, and right here we run into our first bump within the narrative, classicists and biblical students have debated whether or not to name these chunks “paragraphs,” at the very least within the trendy sense. Initially, save for a number of hints in any other case, these marks can’t be attributed to the authors of the paperwork; they signify a later (maybe centuries-later) reader’s or scribe’s interpretation of a given doc’s construction (which typically varies between copies). Extra importantly, classical rhetoric had no idea of “the paragraph” as “a generic unit of discourse,” because the rhetorician Jeanne Fahnestock has noticed. To make certain, historic rhetoricians have been formidable students, and left behind an infinite physique of helpful counsel about language (poetic and prosaic), argumentation, and training, amongst different issues. However their principal cost was the coaching of orators, and although some lecturers inspired writing workouts to that finish, none taught the talent of assembling a collection of written blocks of textual content, every designed to unfold concepts, themes, topics, incidents, and so on. Antiquity, in brief, supplied the terminology from which the paragraph derives however no edicts to manipulate its manufacturing.
The medievals steadily disbanded the scriptio continua phalanx. First its area was taken. Within the late Roman Empire, the bookroll was displaced by the brand new stack-and-flip writing expertise, the codex (what we normally imply by “guide” now), which had been adopted early on by Christian communities and was higher suited to northern lands the place papyrus was exhausting to come back by however animal skins weren’t. The codex launched the web page—a brand new floor, framing system, and interface whose prospects scribes and artists of the Excessive Center Ages would consciously exploit. However the extra instant menace to scriptio continua was the problem it posed for younger monks with dodgy Latin. Transitional figures, together with St. Jerome (c. 342–420) and Isidore of Seville (560–636), made efforts to make phrases and clauses extra simply discernible to novice readers by recycling outdated practices of dotting and aligning clauses to extend readability. The extra decisive change, although, was the event of what the paleographer M.B. Parkes dubbed a brand new “grammar of legibility” within the eighth and ninth centuries—amongst Irish monks, their English counterparts, and, additional nonetheless, inside Charlemagne’s realm (the so-called “Carolingian Renaissance”). These scribes employed a number of methods to provide a extra legible textual content, together with devising the primary miniscule script (i.e., “lower-case”), however none was extra conspicuous, or momentous, than their follow of leaving house between phrases as they wrote. The guide historian Paul Saenger likened an early type of this type of writing to aeration—as if the phrases have been eventually given room to breathe on their very own.
Like their historic predecessors, medieval scribes had a variety of methods of figuring out subsections, together with the paragraphus (be aware the Latinization), albeit now in its mature classical kind resembling a Greek gamma. (Isidore was nonetheless, influentially, commending it as a technique for signaling beginnings within the seventh century.) But within the Excessive Center Ages, the paragraphus could be eclipsed by a mark recognized alternatively as a paraph or capitulum, whose origins lie within the Roman follow of putting “Ok” (from the Etruscan phrase for “head,” kaput) in the beginning of chapters and sections. Over the centuries, that Ok grew to become a C, and the C was later merged with slanting bars, finally producing the trendy paragraph mark, recognized in English because the pilcrow (¶).
Usually inserted into the textual content by a specialist often called a rubricator (for the crimson ink he usually used), the paraph would develop into a ubiquitous function of medieval paperwork—used to spotlight quite a lot of chunks and gobbets, together with sentences, glosses, verses, and elements of arguments (as in Aquinas’s Summa). It’s not unusual to discover a medieval web page speckled with paraphs, particularly in works that includes commentaries such because the medieval best-bestseller, the Bible. The picture of the paraph was so recognizable {that a} late Center English poet may describe Christ’s 5 wounds as in the event that they have been paraphs: “Wrout is on þe bok with-oute / V. paraffys grete & stoute, / Bolyd in rose crimson” (“Wrought on the guide with out / 5 paraphs nice and stout /Standing out in rose crimson”).
The signal’s ubiquity was not the one advance. Medieval authors additionally reveal a rising consciousness of the paragraph as a definite textual unit. One of many earliest examples of this shift in French seems within the abbot and poet Gautier de Coincy’s (1177–1236) Miracles de Nostre Dame. In verses discussing his follow of together with codas that sum up the morals of the work’s sections, Coincy advises the detached reader to “skip it on the acceptable paragraph” (“Que cui la queue ne plaira / Au polagrefe la laira”). Some medieval authors even level the reader to paragraphs showing in others’ books. “Hostience [i.e., Hostiensis], in Summa de decimis,” writes a late fourteenth-century Center English creator on this vein, “within the paraf, Quid si clericus, seith {that a} man shall not geue tithis to such a clerk.” The Center Ages, in different phrases, found the paragraph’s potential as a location system.
Medieval readers and writers have been thus more and more attentive to the visible look of the web page, and as outcome acknowledged the paragraph’s important place inside it. Nonetheless, the paragraph doesn’t appear to have medieval rhetoricians. Thus, a number of extra centuries go in our story with out supplying directions a couple of paragraph’s match proportions or packing materials.
Enter the Print Revolution
The practices of early trendy printers formed our psychological picture of a paragraph. Within the first many years after Gutenberg’s nice innovation, the interval of the so-called “incunabula” (Latin for “swaddling garments”), printed books largely, and understandably, mimicked the conventions of web page design governing manuscript books. Accordingly, printers usually left areas on the heads of chapters, sections, and sentences for the rubricator to come back in later so as to add paraphs. Printers additionally forged pilcrows for this function, translating an historic manuscript follow into the brand new world of steel sort.
The primary clear signal of a break with these conventions is discovered within the nice Venetian printer Aldus Manutius’s 1499 version of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. On the beginnings of Aldus’s paragraphs, one finds no paraphor paragraphusor littera notabilior or another type of ornament. Earlier printers had left clean house on the ends of paragraphs to make clear a break; Aldus was the primary to depart open house at first, making this guide the primary to make use of paragraph indentation. Regardless of Aldus’s status, the follow was not broadly adopted for many years, turning into the trade normal solely within the seventeenth century. The pilcrow’s utilization diminished in consequence, although it remained within the public eye—within the English context at the very least—for a number of centuries due to its service because the paragraph marker within the Approved Model (a.okay.a. King James Model) of the Bible.
Early trendy dictionaries present us that the idea too was in flux. Thomas Blount’s 1656 Glossographia, for instance, defines “paragraph” as follows: “(paragraphus) a Pilcrow; no matter is comprehended in a single sentence; the place the road is damaged off (which Printers name a break) there ends the paragraph. Books are most frequently generally divided into Chapters, these into Sections, and Sections once more in Paragraffs.” As Blount’s definition attests, early moderns considered the paragraph as a punctuation mark (and on this regard was normally mentioned in grammar books alongside intervals, colons, and commas); a sentence, verse (of Scripture), or subsection of a doc cordoned off by that mark; or, most strikingly for current functions, a typographically outlined amount of textual content. The final chance would come more and more into focus over the following many years, with the outcome that the 1706 new version of The New World of English Phrases would outline a paragraph as “a Portion of Matter in a Discourse or Treatise, contained between two Breaks, i.e. which begins with a brand new Line, and ends the place the Line breaks off.” (In the meantime the subsequent entry, for “paragraphe,” harkens again to our Greek start line: “a Writing or Observe within the Margin of a E-book.”)
However early moderns weren’t simply seeing the paragraph otherwise due to typography. They have been additionally (in the end) appraising the paragraph as a side of the author’s craft. The emergent periodical tradition of the late seventeenth century was a transparent stimulus, because the pages of newspapers and magazines consisted of nothing however paragraphs. In The Spectator #134 (1711), for instance, Richard Steele cites a fictitious reader who experiences discovering “every Paragraph” of the paper “freight[ed] both with helpful or pleasant Notions.” (In the meantime, a personality in Richard Sheridan’s Faculty for Scandal [1777] bewails the draw back of the periodical paragraph: “I’m sneered at by all my acquaintance—paragraphed within the news-papers.”) In The Adventurer #138 (1754), Samuel Johnson may title the problem of paragraph development among the many “widespread distresses of the author.” He explains:
Generally many ideas current themselves; however so confused and unconnected, that they don’t seem to be with out problem diminished to technique, or concatenated in a daily and dependent collection; the thoughts falls directly right into a labyrinth, of which neither the start nor finish may be found, and toils and struggles with out progress or extrication.
Johnson goes on to lament that too usually a author requires—however fails to search out—“solely a correspondent time period to be able to end a paragraph with class, and make one in every of its members reply to the opposite.” “[A]fter a protracted examine and vexation,” Johnson continues, “the passage is turned anew, and the net unwoven that was so practically completed.” His modern Edward Gibbon, creator of the mammoth Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789), likewise labored by complete paragraphs, which he memorably likened to a technique of casting and tuning: “It has all the time been my follow to forged a protracted paragraph in a single mould, to strive it by my ear, to deposit it in my reminiscence, however to droop the motion of the pen until I had given the final polish to my work.”
Regardless of all of this consideration to paragraphs, grammars and rhetorical handbooks wouldn’t deal with the topic in additional than passing style till the very finish of the eighteenth century. The breakthrough guide, although, was a preferred one: the American Quaker Lindley Murray’s 1795 English Grammar, which might undergo quite a few editions within the ensuing century in each England and america. Wedged within the midst of his part on punctuation, Murray decorously, even tentatively, affords “a number of basic instructions respecting the division of a composition into paragraphs.” In 4 quick paragraphs, he advises as follows: Completely different topics “except they be very quick” needs to be separated into completely different paragraphs; lengthy topics needs to be divided into a number of paragraphs, with the breaks ideally made “at sentiments of essentially the most weight, or that decision for peculiar consideration”; “[t]he details, premises, and conclusions of a topic, typically naturally level out the separations into paragraphs”; and when a “linked topic” is split into paragraphs, “an acceptable flip of expression, exhibiting the connexion [sic] of the damaged elements, will give magnificence and drive to the division.”
Whereas that is hardly a “concept” of the paragraph, Murray’s recommendation is nonetheless suggestive. He begins with the pragmatic downside of size, acknowledging {that a} paragraph can’t be too quick, or it lacks substance, or too lengthy, or it might overtax the reader. (This is able to be a theme in subsequent grammars: “Don’t crowd too many ideas and reasonings into one sentence or paragraph, in order to exceed the capability of these you deal with,” writes Sir Richard Phillips in A Sensible Grammar of the English Language [1809]). However Murray additionally perceives distinct rhetorical and aesthetic prospects throughout the paragraph’s construction. As we’d say now, Murray senses “sizzling spots,” particularly on the breaks, the place phrases’ affect heightens. The paragraph is being introduced to its younger reader as a collection of distinct formal and purposeful issues and alternatives. To mismanage one was to threat dropping one’s reader. Managing one’s materials effectively, in contrast, gave one’s finest factors even higher impact.
Leo Damrosch has argued that the “totally crafted paragraph” was the unit of composition for Johnson and Gibbon, however the level holds for thus lots of the readers and writers of the age. There isn’t any doubt that by the top of the eighteenth century the paragraph was acknowledged as a standard downside and, in the precise arms, a verbal artwork.
Victorian Laws
The attentive reader could have observed that I’ve now lined some twenty-two centuries and never but spoken about matter sentences, supporting sentences, or concluding ones. Even with Murray’s mild “basic instructions,” we’re removed from the unequivocal pronouncement that “A paragraph is a bunch of sentences that develops one central thought.” On this method, the historical past I’ve been tracing is instructive, particularly for readers who have been taught in grade faculty that matter sentences and the like are as elemental as oxygen. They don’t seem to be. The truth is, the seemingly ageless dictates on paragraph development drilled into so many people as kids are among the many most trendy elements of writing instruction. Unusual as it might appear, the long-awaited law-giver—the Solon or Lycurgus of the Paragraph—was a Victorian thinker. Enter Alexander Bain.
Bain’s title must be higher recognized given how industrious the person was—along with making necessary contributions in linguistics and logic, Bain was a central determine within the growth of psychology as a self-discipline and a cofounder of the distinguished journal Thoughts (which might later publish notable papers by Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, and Alan Turing). Whereas composition had been an curiosity of Bain’s for the reason that 1840s, he possible wouldn’t have develop into an authority on the paragraph if not for the merger of two universities in his native Scotland, which allowed Bain to develop into directly the Regius Chair of Logic and Regius Chair of English Literature on the College of Aberdeen in 1861. At this level, Bain grew to become a trainer of writing. Inside quick order he had composed a textbook, English Composition and Rhetoric (1866), which rhetoricians would later credit score with providing “the primary systematic formulation of paragraph concept” (to make use of Paul Rodgers’s phrasing).
That concept bears the unmistakable stamp of Bain’s philosophical coaching. As Rodgers astutely observes, Bain and his epigones “labored by deduction, first assuming a detailed natural parallel between sentence and paragraph, after which making use of conventional sentence-law to the paragraph.” Bain’s watchword was “unity.” “A sentence,” he writes,” is required to own Unity,” by which he implies that “each half” should be “subservient to 1 principal affirmation.” Bain understood the paragraph because the “division of discourse subsequent greater than the sentence,” and accordingly defines it as “a set, or collection, of sentences, with unity of function” (italics mine). Bain was not distinctive. His modern Joseph Angus likewise names unity as a shared attribute of the sentence and paragraph in A Handbook of the English Tongue (1861): “Paragraphs require the factor of unity as a lot as sentences; however the unity is extra complete.”
What set English Composition and Rhetoric aside was that Bain may clarify how you can create unity by devising six succinct guidelines for paragraph development. They’re as follows:
- “The bearing of every sentence upon what precedes shall be specific and unmistakable.”
- “When a number of consecutive sentences iterate or illustrate the identical thought, they need to, as far as attainable, be shaped alike.”
- “The opening sentence, except so constructed as to be clearly preparatory, is anticipated to point with prominence the topic of the paragraph.”
- “A paragraph needs to be consecutive, or free from dislocation.”
- “A paragraph ought to possess unity; which suggests a particular function, and forbids digressions and irrelevant matter.”
- “As within the sentence, so within the paragraph, a due proportion ought to acquire between principal and subordinate statements.”
Behind Bain’s considerably stilted Victorian phrasing lies a grand imaginative and prescient of natural concord—through which each sentence, each clause, each half and particle has its acceptable place. Certainly, in explaining Rule #3, Bain says as a lot instantly: “Every paragraph has a plan dictated by the character of the composition.” And Bain didn’t merely situation decrees: His supporting evaluation and examples dig into the nitty-gritty of conjunctions, relative pronouns, coordination, subordination, and parallelism to be able to present how it may be accomplished. (At one level, he even suggests an alteration to the Lord’s Prayer to attain correct parallelism.)
Bain is working in the other way of up to date commentators akin to Steven Pinker, for whom the paragraph is a wholly synthetic assemble, missing any connection to a deeper psychological or epistemological actuality. For Bain, in contrast, the paragraph is the hub the place ideas align correctly to kind significant sequences of concepts. The paragraph is the staging floor for a type of cogitatio continua, a phalanx for the thoughts. It’s this imaginative and prescient of the paragraph’s mental unity and centrality that underwrites Bain’s argument within the 1887 enlarged version of English Composition and Rhetoric that the “Paragraph Legal guidelines […] are the overall rules that should regulate the construction of sections, chapters, and books.” Bain’s doctrines exalt the as soon as marginal paragraph to maybe the best heights it has but attained; on this system, it’s directly the core element of composition and the perfect sample of the entire.
English Composition and Rhetoric didn’t trigger a fantastic stir upon its preliminary publication, although the guide did entice an American writer in 1867 and a second London version a yr later. As Rodgers explains, Bain’s conception of the paragraph “was elaborated and enforced” throughout the decade of 1884–1894 due, specifically, to the popularity of American composition instructors, together with John Genung of Amherst Faculty and Barrett Wendell of Harvard, of the necessity for a concept of the paragraph to information their efforts. “Inside the final era,” G.R. Carpenter of Columbia Faculty explains in his 1893 Workout routines in Rhetoric and English Composition, “and particularly the current second, correct paragraph-structure has develop into one of the vital important elements of English composition.”
In his 1894 dissertation on the College of Chicago, A Historical past of the English Paragraph (itself a notable growth), Edwin Herbert Lewis named Bain “maybe the ablest author on rhetoric since Aristotle” on the energy of his six guidelines. Surveying the burgeoning literature on the paragraph, Lewis noticed that Bain’s laws “have re-appeared with new names and varied modifications in the very best text-books of the final quarter-century.” Thus, Rule #3, regarding “opening sentences,” would contribute to the rise of the subject sentence, and several other of the principles could be invoked in subsequent authors’ requires “unity” and “coherence.” To this present day, textbook definitions of the paragraph, just like the one with which I started this essay, are indebted to Bain’s theorizing.
Challengers started to appear within the ensuing many years (such because the aforementioned Herbert Learn), however Bain’s concept held broad sway till the later many years of the 20th century, when it confronted a collection of theoretical objections throughout the area of writing research, most rooted in empirical research. (One well-known survey confirmed, for instance, the paucity of matter sentences in common essay writing.) However the opposition did not generate an acceptable substitute, main, because the rhetorician Mike Duncan has noticed, to 2 principal positions amongst instructors. The “prescriptive” camp “stands by Bain’s concepts of specific construction and first place matter sentences,” arguing {that a} paragraph “a particular, supreme construction that may be described, measured, and emulated for educational functions.” The “descriptive” possibility, in contrast, adopts “a looser, inductive method to instruction, with Bain-style guidelines restricted to suggesting a structural supreme that’s solely hardly ever seen.” This will likely seem to be intellectual nitpicking. However the debate has apparent penalties within the classroom. The place the prescriptive mannequin reigns, college students have a mannequin to work with, however the mannequin could create as many issues because it solves. (Rodgers calls the Bain paragraph a “deductive cage.”) In the meantime, as Duncan writes, “the issue with descriptivism […] is that it’s devilishly troublesome and maybe equally merciless to clarify to struggling college students that they’ll do something with a paragraph so long as it really works.”
Reasonably than throw up his arms as Pinker does, Duncan sees the deadlock as an event for contemporary fascinated by the paragraph’s nature and performance. “Whereas we have now actually hundreds of years of fashion dialogue to lean on on the sentence stage,” he writes, “the paragraph is a comparatively new concern” for skilled rhetoricians, “and the scant out there terminology displays its still-evolving youth.” Duncan calls, in flip, for higher terminology, higher textbooks (which acknowledge a world past Bain), and a reexamination of outdated ideas which have by no means been sufficiently theorized akin to “movement,” “stream,” “concord,” and “rhythm.”
I can’t faux to know the answer to the paragraph in concept or follow, however I consider the historical past simply reviewed sheds some useful mild on the topic. I recommend 3 ways to conceive of paragraphs rooted in its previous lives reaching again to its Greek origins. These usually are not Bain-style laws for what a paragraph should be. One clear takeaway from in the present day’s historical past lesson is definitely that there’s not now, has by no means been, and can by no means be a single Platonic type of the paragraph to which all others should conform. The paragraph has advanced over time to satisfy quite a lot of sensible wants and aesthetic impulses. It has been, to return to Johnson’s metaphor, woven and unwoven after which woven anew many occasions over the centuries. What follows, then, are proposals to assist my fellow practitioners to mirror on what a paragraph can be.
¶ Paragraphs as tips: Earlier than setting to work, historic, medieval, and trendy scribes alike have used a device—maybe an axe, maybe a pencil, maybe one other technique of impressing or scratching—to attract traces to information their subsequent labors at hand-lettering. These marks are of apparent utility to the scribe. They’re additionally useful to the reader as a result of they stop the script from wandering or alternating haphazardly in dimension. Tips are, on this method, a component of Parkes’s “grammar of legibility”—or a part of its vital infrastructure. But the rules additionally facilitate creative expression—since in addition they set up a area exterior the traces through which the scribe’s prospers could trespass. I suggest that we deal with the “guidelines” of Bain and firm, significantly these designed to advertise coherence, like these dominated traces—as elected parameters from which we could deviate as wanted. The spirit of what I suggest is effectively said by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren of their case for the paragraph in Fashionable Rhetoric (1949): “Since communication of 1’s ideas is at finest a troublesome enterprise, it’s a part of widespread sense, to not point out good manners, to mark for the reader the divisions of our thought, and thus make the thought construction seen upon the web page.” Paragraphing is generally taught as a technical relatively than an moral exercise, however as Brooks and Warren’s pleasant phrase “good manners” reminds us, it may be one thing we undertake courteously, even lovingly, on behalf of our readers. A subject sentence, on this understanding, is a kindness relatively than an everlasting mandate.
¶ Paragraphs as plastic lots: Paragraphs have been imagined as steel forged in molds, woven thread, measures of music, and vessels laden with concepts. For Herbert Learn, the very best picture is of clay, whether or not formed by a “modeller” right into a determine or potter on the wheel, her arms making use of “downward” and “driving” forces. The metaphor is just not sudden provided that others have described paragraphs as a form sculpture. However Learn places his personal twist on the idea by emphasizing the connection between the form and the author’s thought: “There’s about good writing a visible actuality. It precisely reproduces what we should always metaphorically name the contour of our thought. The metaphor is for as soon as actual: thought has a contour or form. The paragraph is the notion of this contour or form.” He continues: “The paragraph is a plastic mass, and it takes its form from the thought it has to specific: its form is the thought.” What Learn so clearly perceives is {that a} paragraph is just not merely the file of our considering—as if that’s accomplished “off web page.” A paragraph is considering—it’s the house through which we do the troublesome enterprise of constructing connections, arranging proof and incidents, making an attempt to get from one state of understanding to a different. It is because of this that Learn so vehemently rejects the notion {that a} paragraph has just one thought. A useless paragraph, on Learn’s telling, is monotonous; a residing one permits us to see an energetic thoughts at work. The image of the paragraph as a “plastic mass,” furthermore, appears to me particularly useful for fascinated by the number of attainable configurations that any given materials would possibly take relying on whose arms take it up (tempo Bain’s view that the paragraph has a vital form dictated by the “plan” of the essay). In flip, Learn’s imaginative and prescient of writing as modeling or throwing pots permits for writers to mature into their very own signature paragraph shapes.
¶ Paragraphs as readers’ prerogatives: A couple of years in the past, I confronted a minor skilled disaster when trying over a studying I had assigned by a sure notable critic. Mentioned critic has a penchant for composing labyrinthine paragraphs, which, I now realized, would rapidly exhaust my college students. Though I felt a tinge of compunction about tampering with these paragraphs, I set to work understanding this was the one method salvaging the studying. The breaks got here simply, although, and I quickly discovered the work pleasurable. I used to be seeing the piece in a brand new method, and I “found” a number of outstanding sentences that I had neglected whereas navigating my method by way of the labyrinths. What’s extra, the scholars liked the studying and several other commented on sentences that had been shifted to entrance or again finish “sizzling spots,” their drive and wonder elevated simply as Lindley Murray suggests.
Now a confession: That train so emboldened me that it’s now a regular follow of mine in dealing with readings in lower-level lessons, and I’ve repeatedly noticed the identical outcomes. In my very own studying, I’ve been amused to search out confessions from fellow paragraph-tinkerers, akin to these remarks by John Maxwell within the preface to his 1727 translation of Richard Cumberland’s A Treatise of the Legal guidelines of Nature:
His Paragraphs additionally, in lots of locations, usually are not divided in such a way as to offer essentially the most Gentle to his Argument, typically becoming a member of them the place they need to be divided, and dividing them the place the Reasoning requires that they need to be be a part of’d. All these Circumstances conspire to make the Studying of his priceless Work, a laborious Job, which, subsequently, few Readers shall be on the Pains to do. This I believed effectively deserv’d a serving to Hand to which I’ve, subsequently, contributed what lay in my energy.
The paragraph started as a reader’s mark; to the reader it ought to return. Definitely, we have now the expertise to make paragraphs malleable, whether or not by loosening the controls of digital environments or taking over a pencil in print ones. A pilcrow or a paraph will do. The truth is, making a brand new paragraph is as simple as drawing a skinny line within the margin.
