What is a Paragraph?
Photo from Town and Country Magazine
The paragraph is more than just a string of words placed together. It’s also more than a formulaic structure of topic sentences, theses, and main ideas. Although students are often taught in elementary school that a paragraph is strictly composed of five sentences, the paragraph is actually a concept that has evolved over centuries. Through creative methods such as crafting long, unbroken paragraphs that resemble streams of consciousness, as well as writing entire books in a script format, the paragraph once again morphs into many different shapes, but ultimately continues to highlight the authors’ intentions.
Contrary to the standard “five sentence” structure, some authors write in such a style that it seems entire streams of consciousness were taken straight from the characters’ minds. In Sally Rooney’s works, paragraphs lack quotation marks; at times, there aren’t even line breaks when different characters are speaking, which can be off-putting to readers. When considering her novel Conversations with Friends, however, this writing style reflects how most of the story takes place in the head of Frances, the self-centered yet insecure protagonist. There is hardly any actual plot, and seeing as the book is made up of Frances’ various non-actions as she overthinks everything in her life, the proper use of quotation marks might have taken the reader out of Frances’ mind. Similarly, Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You contains pages upon pages of single paragraphs, all predominantly the narrator’s thoughts and observations, which reflects his inability to see the world from a different perspective. Like Frances, he spends so much time in his own mind, as reflected in Greenwell’s unconventionally lengthy paragraphs. There isn’t a “single Platonic form of the paragraph to which all others must conform,” but instead, these 2 writing styles reflect characters’ aspects that might otherwise have been hindered (Gibson, 2022).
If this “single Platonic form” were to exist, it would also have limited works that rely on
different formats (Gibson, 2022). Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six was written as if it was the script of a documentary, evoking feelings of nostalgia as members of a famous rock band recount their rise to fame, decades after they’ve broken up. Without this format, readers might not have easily distinguished the characters’ various personalities, proving that the paragraph has “evolved over time to meet a variety of practical needs and aesthetic impulses” (Gibson, 2022). As readers catch inconsistencies between what characters are saying about the same event, either because the characters don’t recall exact details or because they are exaggerating their perspectives, tension is also introduced, adding more complexity to the story.
As writers continue to break free of writing standards, the paragraph isn’t phased out, but instead is embraced as an ever-evolving concept. It molds itself differently in various works, yet continues to reflect authors’ intentions, allowing the readers to better understand how the authors’ brains function, and therefore re-evaluate ideas about writing itself.
References
Gibson, Richard Hughes (2022, July 14). Past Lives of the Paragraph. The Hedgehog
Review, https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/past-lives-of-the-paragraph