An Art of Choice: Composing Paragraphs (Part 3)
Claude Monet, Stack of Wheat, (Thaw, Sunset), Oil on Canvas, 1891, Art Institute of Chicago
By Dr. Melvin Hall,
Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric
from the University of Wisconsin — Madison.
❞ The Beautiful is the appropriate.
- Aristotle, Topics
How Do Writers Know When a Paragraph is Complete?
My students often ask me, “How many sentences do you want my paragraphs to be – five, six, or seven sentences?” My answer is usually similar to Aristotle’s statement that “the Beautiful is the appropriate.” In other words, the paragraph is complete when the writer is satisfied that the reader will be content with the meaning. Succinctly, a complete paragraph is an appropriate paragraph.
The purpose of my answer is to encourage students to think of writing as addressed to a reader who has discursive needs, expectations, and desires that the writer needs to fulfill. A writer must harmonize the readers’ desires and expectations, with the writer’s desires and expectations, and with the form’s demands (form has its own phenomenological desires and expectations).
We spend a lot of time in class reading, discussing, and revising students’ paragraphs and essays as a group, harmonizing the trinity of desires and expectations. So students have experienced the collective satisfaction that a paragraph’s meaning is well-developed and complete. Knowing the appropriate takes practice and dedication to revision.
How Do Writers Revise Their Writing to Learn the Appropriate?
Socialize
Writers learn how to revise their writing by seeking formative feedback (criticism). We can do this ourselves by setting aside our composition for several days and then returning to it. Or we can request feedback from our friends and colleagues (peers). The basic questions to ask are:
1) What is working well in the draft? What did the writer do well?
2) What needs revision in the paragraph? Where is the meaning confusing or lead to a question?
Notice that these questions focus on a text’s meaning and organization (higher order organizational principles) and not on its grammar, spelling, or punctuation.
For paragraphs these feedback questions are helpful:
1) Is the paragraph unified – does it develop a single unit of thought?
2) Is the paragraph coherent – do the ideas and sentences have a logical and articulated development?
3) Where does the idea or claim need an additional example or more support?
In Part 1 and Part 2, we used generative opposites to compose our paragraph defining science fiction. We can also use generative opposites to revise drafts and to determine a paragraph’s appropriate form. To use generative opposites as both revision and development tools, make them questions. Table 1 below provides a brief outline of some questions that can assist writers in discovering a paragraph’s appropriate form.
Readers and reviewers can apply the questions in Table 1 to each sentence of a paragraph (reading sentence by sentence) or to a whole paragraph (considering its meaning as whole). The answers to these questions will depend on the paragraph’s position and function within the whole text. If a writer can internalize these questions, it will facilitate their drafting process. Once again notice the generative opposites question and answer play a prominent role in drafting and revising.
Readers and reviewers can apply these questions to each sentence of a paragraph (reading sentence by sentence) or to a paragraph as a whole (considering its meaning as whole). The answers to these questions will depend on the paragraph’s position and function within the whole text. If a writer can internalize these questions, it will facilitate their drafting process. Once again notice the generative opposites question and answer play a prominent role in drafting and revising.
How Do Genre and Audience Shape a Paragraph’s Form?
Of course, genre shapes a paragraph’s form. For example, the paragraphs in a research design or article must fulfill certain expected functions: abstract, introduction, research problem, method, data collection, analysis, and conclusion. (This generic outline has many variations depending on the discipline and journal).
Here, however, I want to focus on the way genre shapes a paragraph’s typographical form - the number of sentences and its physical shape. Throughout the blog, we have focused on the idea that a paragraph’s form takes shape when a writer’s focus is on making meaning. However, a paragraph's physical form itself (its typography and quantitative elements) has a significant phenomenological influence on a culture’s thought. A paragraph is, after all, a cultural form. And just as much as meaning creates form, the reverse is also true. Form creates meaning, (Note the new generative opposites form / meaning). Technology’s influence, for example, on writing style is becoming increasingly clear. Paragraphs have become shorter and shorter – usually between one and four sentences in most popular, journalistic genres, and even academic and literary genres.
I encourage writers to collect and examine paragraphs’ typographical forms used in various disciplines. I provide one contrastive example below. Notice the remarkable difference in paragraph morphology between a journalistic paragraph (New York Times) and science journal paragraph (Science). Don’t read the paragraphs. The purpose is to see how form affects a reader’s and writer’s a priori expectations of what is an appropriate and complete paragraph. Writers begin to draft paragraphs with these impressions of a paragraph in mind (consciously or unconsciously). Our tacit expectations of an appropriate paragraph (and, therefore, appropriate thought) are determined by what we most often read.
Glanz, J., Grondahl, M., Rosales, H., Singhvi, A. & Walker, M. (2024, 23 January). How did a Boeing jet end up with a big hole. New York Times.
Nuno, F. R. et al. (2021, 14 April). Genomics and epidemiology of the P.1 SARS-CoV-2 lineage in Manaus, Brazil. Science, 327(6544), pp. 815-821.
The takeaway is that a paragraph’s genre and readers’ expectations affect a writer’s and readers’ sense of what is appropriate for a paragraph’s shape and size. So if I am writing for a newspaper (and its readers), I will have to divide the twelve-sentence paragraph that we drafted in Part 2 into several paragraphs of between one and two sentences. If I am writing an academic or literary article (scholarly readers), I can probably leave the paragraph at twelve sentences. However, writers will have to carefully study the articles published in their target journals. For example, as I scan a feature article in the journal Nature, a leading international scientific journal, I discover the paragraphs are between one and two sentences long – occasionally three and four sentences (Lenharo, 2024, pp. 438 – 40). Yet, in articles dedicated to reporting scientific research, paragraphs can be quite long: ten to twelve sentences. (Nuno, 2021, pp. 815 – 821).
A writer determines a paragraph’s appropriateness by moving to-and-fro in the interplay between form (cultural and reader expectations) and meaning (what the writer intends and wants to say). When the writer is satisfied that the paragraph's form is appropriate, its meaning is complete. And the reverse is true: when the paragraph’s meaning is appropriate, its form is complete.
What Do Paragraphs and Haystacks Have in Common?
In the blog’s three parts, we have followed one perspective or set of descriptive observations that capture a paragraph taking shape at a single moment in time. If you asked me to describe how to write a paragraph tomorrow, or the next day, I would emphasize different heuristic tools, stress different questions, take a different order of steps, and write a different paragraph with slightly or drastically different words and sentence types. It would still be the writing process with many of the same tools and steps, and it would still produce a paragraph about science fiction films.
However, to describe the reality of the paragraph – how a paragraph takes shape each time for each writer – is like Monet trying to capture the reality of a haystack. It seems simple – a single haystack. But he produced a series of 25 paintings depicting a haystack. He encountered the same idea of a haystack in different seasons, in different weather, from different angles, in different light, and when he was in different moods – nature at Giverny affording him different material and capturing his attention in different ways. And this says nothing about the evolving technologies and techniques that influenced his impressions of a haystack (Wildenstein, 1978, pp. 20 - 22). The paragraph is like Monet’s haystack. Each time we encounter it in different intellectual seasons, weather, lighting, and moods a new aspect of its reality is revealed. And we will adjust our writing process to render the momentary impression of thought we desire to share with our reader.
In this blog’s three parts (Part 1, Part 2), I have foregrounded certain skills and tools of the writing process while many others remained hidden. They continued to operate in the background as a vital part of the composing process. For example, sentence structure remained a tacit and unconscious skill. The sentences “happened,” but I was largely unaware of how the sentences were taking shape. So, how to develop a sentence style – make sentences an automatic and unconscious part of writers’ repertoire so they can focus on making meaning – will be the topic of a new series of blogs.
References
Lenharo, M. (2024, 18 January). Consciousness: The future of an embattled field. Nature, 625(7995), pp. 438 – 440.
Nuno, F. R. et. Al (2021, 14 April). Genomics and epidemiology of the P.1 SARS-CoV-2 lineage in Manaus, Brazil. Science, 327(6544), pp. 815-821. Genomics and epidemiology of the P.1 SARS-CoV-2 lineage in Manaus, Brazil | Science
Wildenstein, D. (1978). “Monet’s Giverny.” In Monet’s years at Giverny: Beyond impressionism (pp. 15 - 40). New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Date
25 May