This is going to be a shorter chapter, but I thought it might be useful for some to hear about how to write a paragraph. To a lot of the more experienced writers on here, that might seem like a silly thing to ask. A paragraph is a paragraph. It starts, it ends, and you see one when you see one. But long, overblown run on chapters with the absence of breaks, confusing and mismatched ideas, and bad spacing have convinced me that not everyone really understands what a paragraph is or what it is there for.
In elementary school, I recall being taught that a paragraph is 4 sentences. Long sentences or short sentences, you write four of them, break, new paragraph. Each paragraph is started with a tab button, a space, or indentation. Back when I was in elementary school, computers were in their infancy and handwritten was the norm. Since handwriting can be a little wonky, it was important to have that indentation on the first line of a new paragraph, or readers struggle to identify when the new paragraph started.
Naturally, you can see from this very writing that I don't indent my paragraphs. Instead, the writing software I use places a space at the end of a "soft return" or "enter" and it leaves things easy to read for you guys. I write my scientific articles this way. I write my cover letters this way. I've found that basically everything works just fine without the need of a tab at the beginning of each chapter, especially in this day and age.
However, indents aside, what really makes a paragraph a paragraph? Is it completely arbitrary? IE is it there just to be there?
I think most of you probably know the main reason paragraphs exist. It's to space out writing so that your writing is easier to read. Paragraphs are essentially there to group an idea. Each paragraph introduces a different (although often relatable) idea. The first paragraph of this very post portrays the idea that paragraphs are worthy of discussion. The second leads into a conversation about what paragraphs look like. The third concludes this train of thought. The forth leads you into the nitty and gritty of paragraph form...and so on, and so forth.
When do I choose to end a paragraph and start a new one? There is no specific way I decide. Could I have just asked that beginning question at the end of my last paragraph instead of including it in this one? Very probably... and that means that paragraphs can be pretty darn flexible when you get right down to it. Where you start a new paragraph, and where you end it, can often lead to different interpretations on what you said. Do you want to stress something to start a new train of thought, or end your current train of thought with that idea?
Some rules are less flexible than others. Dialogue, for example, is something that needs to be broken often. Two people should not speak in the same paragraph. However, as solid as that rule is, it all cycles back to the reason of making things easier to read. Just like a person can only remember a 7 digit phone number, a person can only retain an idea for a handful of sentences. If you don't break the sentences up with a breath, your writing becomes a muddled mess.
Now, paragraphs can be large, and they can be small. They can range from 1 sentence, to 10 sentences. But the main point is how unified those central ideas are. You start going off on another topic mid paragraph, and it starts getting confusing.
At the beginning of each paragraph, readers mentally prepare themselves for the new ideas within, so you can change or introduce new ideas with new paragraphs in way you might not be able to before.
Now, with regards to 1 sentence paragraphs or 10 sentences, just like how you want your sentences to be varied, you'd also want your paragraphs to vary. Every idea you want to present to me, whether it be the environment of a room, the feel of a kiss, or the act of running out of a house, takes a certain amount of sentences to present. You do every idea in 1 sentence, and you end up with a detail less, chipped off writing that feels abrupt and hard to follow. You spend 10 paragraphs describing each and every event, and the pacing will slow to a crawl. A bunch of long, 10 sentence paragraphs will quickly bog down a work.
Here's another way to look at this. We use letters, which are meaningless by themselves, until they are combined into words. Words themselves are capable of conjuring up a single, static image. I say 'dog' and you can imagine an image of a dog. Combining that into a sentence turns that static image into an event, a single action, description, or motion.
Those actions, descriptions, and motions get put together to create an idea. That idea is your paragraph. You combine all your ideas together and you end up with a scene, otherwise known as a chapter. Combine all of those chapters and you end up with the story, which makes up your book.
So paragraphs aren't just arbitrary. They have the purpose of conveying the thoughts that ultimately make up your story and describe your scenes. They need to be relatable and unified in a manner that makes them easy to read. If a grouping of events can be put together to describe an idea, then that can be combined into a paragraph.
At one point, forming paragraphs will simply become second nature to you. As soon as you say what you want and are ready to start a new idea, your finger will strike enter and you will begin your new idea without a second thought. However, that doesn't mean that in later edits of your story you shouldn't spend a great deal of time considering how paragraphs sound. How easy was that to read? Could you have conveyed your ideas more simply?
The clearer you can convey your ideas, by structuring them properly and grouping them well, the better your story will be. It will be easier to read, easier to remember, and more entertaining for your writer. And in the end, that's what makes a paragraph a paragraph.
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