Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time for an
Speaker 2: episode from the Vault. This one originally published August twenty fifth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two, and it is part two of our
Speaker 2: series on the paragraph.
Speaker 1: Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two
Speaker 2: of our series on the paragraph. Yes, the writing convention
Speaker 2: the paragraph as used in prose. In the last episode,
Speaker 2: of course, if you haven't heard that yet, you should
Speaker 2: go check that out first. But in the last episode
Speaker 2: we especially focused on the history of the paragraph, talking
Speaker 2: about the old Greek and Latin manuscripts of Scriptio continua,
Speaker 2: which is just a big old mess of letters with
Speaker 2: no case differences, no punctuation between sentences, and no spaces
Speaker 2: between words. It sounds like an absolute nightmare. And how
Speaker 2: over time that morphed into a tradition that put a
Speaker 2: greater emphasis on legibility, introducing things like spaces between words
Speaker 2: and punctuation case differences and so forth, but eventually also
Speaker 2: having this tradition of transition markers such as the pill crow,
Speaker 2: which are you know, that's the paragraph symbol. You've probably
Speaker 2: seen it before, especially in medieval manuscripts, often being a
Speaker 2: little red symbol. But then of course that over time
Speaker 2: just giving way to blank space, giving rise to the
Speaker 2: paragraph breaks that we know today now concerning the era
Speaker 2: of medieval manuscripts, where you had these red pill crows
Speaker 2: and they would be filled in by special manuscript artists
Speaker 2: known as rubricators. Again, that's actually from the Latin word
Speaker 2: meaning red, so these are the red text people. That
Speaker 2: there was a quote from a Middle English poem that
Speaker 2: I wanted to share because it struck me as so weird.
Speaker 2: This poem was cited in an essay that I'm going
Speaker 2: to refer to in this episode, and I did in
Speaker 2: the last called Past Lives of the Paragraph by Richard
Speaker 2: Hughes Gibson, published in The Hedgehog Review. But the poem
Speaker 2: goes like this, Okay, so it's in Middle English, I'll
Speaker 2: try it. It's like route is on the book without
Speaker 2: v pariffs, great and stout bullet in rose read and
Speaker 2: what's going on here? Is that the poet is using
Speaker 2: paraff symbols as a metaphor for the five wounds on
Speaker 2: the body of Christ. And in modern English this would
Speaker 2: these lines would say something like wrought on the book
Speaker 2: without five paraffs, great and stout standing out in rose read.
Speaker 2: So there you go. That's your typography and crucifixion narrative
Speaker 2: coming together in one great, glorious stew.
Speaker 1: This is fascinating when it comes to read text. I
Speaker 1: guess the main place one sees it now is that
Speaker 1: many bibles, Christian Bibles will contain passages that are the
Speaker 1: attributed words of Christ in red, and that's a holdover
Speaker 1: from these days. Another case that stands out in my
Speaker 1: memory is the book The House of Leaves, in which
Speaker 1: I believe the word minotaur is featured in red. And
Speaker 1: that book as a whole, I think is interesting to
Speaker 1: think of in terms of something that I keep thinking
Speaker 1: of discussing the paragraph, and that is the format being
Speaker 1: part of the message, part of the communication that if
Speaker 1: you strip away paragraph breaks, it disrupts the communication that
Speaker 1: is taking place between between author and reader. And if
Speaker 1: you strip away other aspects of formatting, if you tinker
Speaker 1: with things like fonts in a negative fashion. It can
Speaker 1: also have such an effect, and that is a book
Speaker 1: for example, that if you were to alter too much
Speaker 1: about the format at all, you end up decaying the
Speaker 1: message and the intended communication of the piece.
Speaker 2: This ties into something we talked about in the last episode,
Speaker 2: which is the somewhat arbitrary designations of which formatting decisions
Speaker 2: are considered integral to the text and which you're not.
Speaker 2: And the big example would be ebooks in the way
Speaker 2: that they break text across different pages. So you change
Speaker 2: the font size on your ebook, the different text will
Speaker 2: appear together with different page groupings. And of course this
Speaker 2: was true before e books. I mean, different printings of
Speaker 2: the same text in book form would usually not have
Speaker 2: the exact same words each page, so page layout is
Speaker 2: not considered integral, usually in a printed book, though of
Speaker 2: course it would be in a book like House of Leaves,
Speaker 2: where it's very much a work of art as well
Speaker 2: as a book. And yet paragraph breaks are considered an
Speaker 2: integral part of the text, and if you change those around,
Speaker 2: people I think would mostly have the sense that you
Speaker 2: are really altering the author's work. There, even though some
Speaker 2: teachers do it and apparently it has good effects, especially
Speaker 2: when teaching a piece of writing that has really long paragraphs.
Speaker 1: I totally forgot to mention a book that I'm I'm
Speaker 1: currently reading, that I'm that I have that are that
Speaker 1: has errors in it. I'm reading an old ebook that
Speaker 1: I have of Frank Herbert's Heretics of Doune, and I
Speaker 1: hadn't I hadn't picked up this e book in a
Speaker 1: very long time, and the formatting was weird in it,
Speaker 1: not consistently, not enough to where I was like, should
Speaker 1: I just buy a new e book of this? Or
Speaker 1: should I press on? But occasionally paragraph breaks would be missing,
Speaker 1: and it would often occur with dialogue, so if I'm
Speaker 1: just reading along, I might miss that one character has
Speaker 1: stopped talking and another character has started talking, or that
Speaker 1: there's been some shift in a thought, and it is
Speaker 1: it was disruptive to reach those points, and I would
Speaker 1: have to stop and go back and sort of pick
Speaker 1: apart with my eyes where the actual paragraph break should
Speaker 1: have occurred, and then I would momentarily think about buying
Speaker 1: a new ebook, and then I would keep going instead.
Speaker 2: Wait, I'm perplexed by the idea of an ebook with
Speaker 2: fixed errors in it. Okay, so you buy a video
Speaker 2: game and it's got bugs, the developers should eventually release
Speaker 2: a patch, like an update that'll download, it'll it'll fix
Speaker 2: your game, and now it won't have the bugs anymore.
Speaker 2: But you download an ebook and it's got bugs in it,
Speaker 2: and what they don't do that?
Speaker 1: No, Well nowadays they can. Nowadays ebooks can you can
Speaker 1: essentially have a patch that goes out through like Amazon
Speaker 1: and whatnot. So I don't know. I guess this is
Speaker 1: just a super old ebook that I have of this
Speaker 1: particular text. So yeah, I should have I should have
Speaker 1: broken and bought a new ebook of it. I actually
Speaker 1: have a physical copy of it as well, and I
Speaker 1: toyed with just switching over to the physical copy, but
Speaker 1: I can't control the size of the text on that,
Speaker 1: so I kind of kind of spoiled by my Kindle.
Speaker 2: So this old one, You're like, it would be like
Speaker 2: waiting on the developers to release a patch for the
Speaker 2: et game for the Atari.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, like this is clearly not the supported copy anymore,
Speaker 1: so or maybe I have something wrong in my settings.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, one thing that I guess ties more into
Speaker 2: the history that we were talking about in the last
Speaker 2: episode is the question of when did the idea of
Speaker 2: a para for a paragraph come to symbolize more the
Speaker 2: chunk of text itself between the breaks rather than the breaks,
Speaker 2: because you know, the Originally the idea is that the
Speaker 2: marker known as the paragraphs in Greek manuscripts was like
Speaker 2: a marginal notation that signaled some kind of transition within
Speaker 2: the text. It was it was written out beside, and
Speaker 2: then over time this morphs through many stages to become
Speaker 2: line breaks and indentation. So when did we start talking
Speaker 2: about paragraphs as the text between those breaks. Well, in
Speaker 2: that article I'm in by Richard Hughes Gibson, Gibson points
Speaker 2: to examples in texts in French and English around the
Speaker 2: thirteenth or fourteenth century that seemed to start making reference
Speaker 2: to paragraphs as sub sections of text, saying things like
Speaker 2: you know, you can skip this paragraph, or talking about
Speaker 2: a text and saying, you know, refer to this paragraph.
Speaker 2: But it seems to be roughly around the late seventeenth
Speaker 2: or early eighteenth century that the more modern definition of
Speaker 2: a paragraph as the passage of text between the line
Speaker 2: breaks and indentation emerges as dominant, and Gibson points to
Speaker 2: a seventeen o six new edition of The New World
Speaker 2: of English Words, which defines a paragraph as quote a
Speaker 2: portion of matter, of discourse or treatise contained between two breaks,
Speaker 2: i e. Which begins with a new line and ends
Speaker 2: where the line breaks off. So by around that time
Speaker 2: you've got people talking about paragraphs, and they are the
Speaker 2: paragraphs that we have today. It's a chunk of texts
Speaker 2: between line breaks. But this leads to another question, which
Speaker 2: is the question of paragraph theory. What actually makes a paragraph?
Speaker 2: Surely people who study language and writing must have come
Speaker 2: up with ideas of Okay, you know, you go out
Speaker 2: and look at paragraphs and books. What are the things
Speaker 2: that paragraphs have in common? How do authors decide where
Speaker 2: to break the line? And this question is not nearly
Speaker 2: as easy to answer as you might assume, especially because
Speaker 2: you know this is not the only thing like this
Speaker 2: in the world. But it's one case where there's sort
Speaker 2: of a formal definition that you will find taught in
Speaker 2: school and that you will find in a lot of
Speaker 2: textbooks that does not at all seem to describe what
Speaker 2: happens just out in the world. And the difference here
Speaker 2: is that you've got all kinds of prescriptive definitions of
Speaker 2: the paragraph, often saying that a paragraph sort of explores
Speaker 2: a central idea or a topic. And we'll get to
Speaker 2: one major proponent of this idea in just a bit.
Speaker 2: But one person that Gibson points to in his essay
Speaker 2: is a poet and art critic named Herbert Reid, who
Speaker 2: wrote a nineteen twenty eight book on English prose style,
Speaker 2: and Gibson writes about read quote taking up his nearly
Speaker 2: century old book one recognizes a peculiar tradition in which
Speaker 2: one textbook after another, one generation after another, has promoted
Speaker 2: a blueprint for paragraph construction conspicuously at odds with the
Speaker 2: prose of the most highly acclaimed stylists of the English language. So,
Speaker 2: in other words, there's a conflict between how paragraphs are
Speaker 2: theorized in textbooks and taught in schools and how they're
Speaker 2: actually used by writers, especially the most popular writers in
Speaker 2: a culture. Good writers do not usually write comp one
Speaker 2: oh one style essays with clear topic sentences and one
Speaker 2: central idea per paragraph. How often do you come across
Speaker 2: that in a book you actually like to read?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Not often? And you know, in fact, I was
Speaker 1: for the last episode and for this episode, I did
Speaker 1: a lot of looking around, thinking, well, I should be
Speaker 1: able to find some perfect paragraphs out there in books
Speaker 1: that I love and books that I admire. And it's
Speaker 1: really hard because if you go into it thinking about
Speaker 1: paragraphs and perhaps having at least this shadow of of
Speaker 1: this school book, this textbook paragraph in your mind, you
Speaker 1: find all sorts of things that don't really fit that form.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. So you look at your favorite books, you are
Speaker 2: probably just not going to find too many paragraphs that
Speaker 2: have a topic sentence and then supporting sentences developing that
Speaker 2: topic idea, and then a line break when you were
Speaker 2: done with that topic, moving on to the next thing.
Speaker 2: There are some reasons we can talk about where I
Speaker 2: think it might make sense for composition classes to teach
Speaker 2: it that way, But yeah, this is just not usually
Speaker 2: what you're going to find out in the wild in
Speaker 2: the books you like. And so we're back to the
Speaker 2: question again, like what actually causes those paragraph breaks to
Speaker 2: happen where they do. They're not random. If you were
Speaker 2: to just rearrange them at random, it would probably produce
Speaker 2: a less good and less cohesive text. And yet it's
Speaker 2: very hard to actually come up with rules to explain
Speaker 2: why they come in the places they do.
Speaker 1: I'll also say that I think that a very effective
Speaker 1: but standard, you know, sort of textbook paragraph is kind
Speaker 1: of like a brick and a cathedral. The bricks are important,
Speaker 1: and there are may be a lot of bricks in
Speaker 1: there holding things together, but they're not the part you remember.
Speaker 1: You remember the flying buttresses, you remember the gargoyles in
Speaker 1: the in the stained glass windows and the and things
Speaker 1: of that nature. And so the parts of a text,
Speaker 1: and in fact, the paragraphs of a text, they probably
Speaker 1: stand out the most to us are the ones that
Speaker 1: are weird, that are you know, big run on sentences
Speaker 1: or short little fragments that have a lot of weird
Speaker 1: things going on in them, like those are those are
Speaker 1: the things that catch our eye. Those are the ones
Speaker 1: we remember.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think even by
Speaker 2: looking at some of the more prescriptive paragraph theorists, even
Speaker 2: if their prescriptive definitions of paragraphs don't really describe what
Speaker 2: you see in the world, they do make some observations
Speaker 2: that are useful. And one thing that's stuck with me
Speaker 2: here is that in Gibson's article, he cites an American
Speaker 2: lawyer and grammarian named Lindley Murray, who in seventeen ninety
Speaker 2: five wrote a book on English grammar called English Grammar,
Speaker 2: which makes some recommendations on how a composition should be
Speaker 2: divided into paragraphs, and literally writes that ideally a paragraph
Speaker 2: is about a single subject. Each subject should get its
Speaker 2: own paragraph, unless subjects are very short. Subjects that are
Speaker 2: very long should be divided into multiple paragraphs or getting
Speaker 2: into some vagueness about exactly what is very short or
Speaker 2: very long here, And who know, people in seventeen ninety
Speaker 2: five might have had more tolerance for very long paragraphs.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure about that, but that seems possible based
Speaker 2: on the text I've surveyed. One thing Linley Murray says
Speaker 2: that I do think is still true is that you
Speaker 2: should often try to place the paragraph breaks quote at
Speaker 2: sentiments of the most weight or that call for particular attention.
Speaker 2: So when you have to divide subjects across multiple paragraphs,
Speaker 2: you are looking for places to place the paragraph breaks
Speaker 2: that will call attention to the sentences directly before or after.
Speaker 2: And so it's interesting that Murray senses what Gibson in
Speaker 2: his essay describes as these quote hot spots places in
Speaker 2: the text, typically occurring near paragraph breaks, where the power
Speaker 2: of the words increases or is emphasized. Paragraph breaks tend
Speaker 2: to draw attention to the words right before and after them.
Speaker 1: This is a great idea, of course, because as a writer,
Speaker 1: you want the reader to keep reading, and this kind
Speaker 1: of works like an arrow pointing from one chunk of
Speaker 1: text to the next, almost like connecting one tile in
Speaker 1: a board game to the following tile. You know where
Speaker 1: to go, and you want to go.
Speaker 2: There, Yes, And I think at this time it's also
Speaker 2: already recognized that paragraph length plays an important role, not
Speaker 2: just in organizing the contents of a piece of writing,
Speaker 2: but also in sort of managing the energy and attention
Speaker 2: of the reader. Because again, if paragraphs are too short,
Speaker 2: the text starts to feel frivolous or insubstantial, and if
Speaker 2: paragraphs are too long, the text starts to feel tedious
Speaker 2: and overtaxing. And so balancing paragraph length serves the function
Speaker 2: of not losing the reader. But okay, it's time to
Speaker 2: talk about Alexander Bain, because when you get into paragraph theory,
Speaker 2: this is a name that is cited, and essentially every
Speaker 2: piece of writing on this subject Alexander Baine is the
Speaker 2: King of paragraph theory. So he was a professor in
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century in Scotland. He was he was the
Speaker 2: chair of Logic and the chair of English Literature at
Speaker 2: the University of Aberdeen. I think he was given those
Speaker 2: posts in eighteen sixty one and he he was one
Speaker 2: of those people at the time who just had like
Speaker 2: a poker and a number of different fires. So I
Speaker 2: think he was also influential in the early development of psychology, yeah,
Speaker 2: but also logic and also English literature. So he became
Speaker 2: a teacher of composition at Aberdeen and ended up writing
Speaker 2: his own text book for his classes that was called
Speaker 2: English Composition in Rhetoric am Manuel. This was published in
Speaker 2: the eighteen sixties. It contained what a scholar called Paul
Speaker 2: Rogers called the first systematic formulation of paragraph theory. And
Speaker 2: if you ever took a comp one oh one class,
Speaker 2: you will probably recognize Bain's idea. Bain's primary concern with
Speaker 2: paragraphs was unity, that each paragraph should have what's called
Speaker 2: unity of purpose. It's doing one main thing. And he
Speaker 2: had like six rules about paragraphs. They are things like,
Speaker 2: first rule, the bearing of each sentence upon what procedes
Speaker 2: shall be explicit and unmistakable. Two, when several consecutive sentences
Speaker 2: iterate or illustrate the same idea, they should, so far
Speaker 2: as possible, be formed alike. And then three, here's the
Speaker 2: big one. The opening sentence, unless so constructed as to
Speaker 2: be obviously preparatory, is expected to indicate with prominence the
Speaker 2: subject of the paragraph. And here it is this is
Speaker 2: your topic sentence rule number three. So, for Alexander Bain,
Speaker 2: each paragraph in a composition should exhaust a single subject,
Speaker 2: and the paragraph should begin with a succinct statement of
Speaker 2: that subject, which is then to be developed in the
Speaker 2: following sentences. Don't you just thrill with the love of
Speaker 2: the English language. But Bain's ideas did prove very influential, and,
Speaker 2: according to Gibson, at least one half of the modern
Speaker 2: discourse on paragraph theory still basically derives from Bain. Gibson writes,
Speaker 2: citing another rhetorician named Mike Duncan, that there are two
Speaker 2: major schools of thought in paragraph theory. You got prescriptivists
Speaker 2: and descriptivists. Paragraph prescriptivists usually say something like the paragraph
Speaker 2: is an ideal structure with an ideal form it's based
Speaker 2: on unity of purpose. Like Bain said, it should be
Speaker 2: about one thing, and it should cover that one thing,
Speaker 2: and that form, that ideal form can be emulated by
Speaker 2: students to practice their writing. Meanwhile, paragraph descriptivists would have
Speaker 2: what Gibson calls quote a looser inductive approach to instruction,
Speaker 2: with Bain style rules limited to suggesting a structural ideal
Speaker 2: that is only rarely seen and thinking about it. I
Speaker 2: can see how there are advantages to teaching writing with
Speaker 2: each of the approaches. So the descriptive school, to my mind,
Speaker 2: saying yeah, paragraphs don't usually work that way is more honest.
Speaker 2: It is more honest about how paragraphs are actually formed
Speaker 2: in popular writing, but it's also a lot harder to teach.
Speaker 2: I mean, if the truth is that a paragraph can
Speaker 2: be anything you want it to be as long as
Speaker 2: it works, as long as it makes sense and feels
Speaker 2: good to the reader, that is a true statement. But
Speaker 2: a student probably doesn't know how to create a paragraph
Speaker 2: that works unless they're just naturally talented. So this is
Speaker 2: just not very helpful advice. So incomes the prescriptive model.
Speaker 2: It doesn't usually describe most of the paragraphs you'll find
Speaker 2: in books you like and articles you like. But it
Speaker 2: is actually something that can be taught and has a
Speaker 2: utility in creating a structure that students can use to
Speaker 2: organize their thoughts and make them clear. So it is
Speaker 2: better than nothing. It is better than not being able
Speaker 2: to write anything coherent at all. But then again, if
Speaker 2: you learn composition on the basis of the prescriptivist thought
Speaker 2: and you're writing Alexander Bain style paragraphs with topic sentences,
Speaker 2: the classic five paragraph essay for a school class, I
Speaker 2: wonder does that constrict the development of your writing skill
Speaker 2: in the domain of organic paragraphs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know. It certainly makes me think of
Speaker 1: the old standard that you need to learn the rules
Speaker 1: before you break the rules you need. It's better to
Speaker 1: start with this rule based system and then move out
Speaker 1: from that so you'll have, you know, somewhere to go
Speaker 1: and somewhere to sort of look back to. So I
Speaker 1: can see the I certainly see the appeal of valuing
Speaker 1: both approaches to the paragraph.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I can agree with that, and I
Speaker 2: guess I was sort of already getting at this. But
Speaker 2: to make it more clear, I wonder if this is
Speaker 2: just one of those things that is a product of
Speaker 2: necessity stemming from the realities of teaching. Like there's no
Speaker 2: systematic way to teach a student to be a great
Speaker 2: prose stylist, to just you know, to write great organic
Speaker 2: paragraphs that people love to read. Like, what would you
Speaker 2: tell them to do? It's no use this word here,
Speaker 2: and you know, like you probably just can't really teach
Speaker 2: that unless you're gonna stick with them their entire life
Speaker 2: and just be really intensive. But you probably can, in
Speaker 2: the course of a semester, help teach a student to
Speaker 2: better organize their thoughts more clearly with a structure like
Speaker 2: the five paragraph essay that has paragraphs with topic sentences
Speaker 2: that are each about a single subject. So I think
Speaker 2: taking a student from incoherent in writing to reasonably clear
Speaker 2: five paragraph essay with Bain style conventions, that's doable. Teaching
Speaker 2: someone to write wonderful organic paragraphs is much more challenging.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this is something that's going to be a
Speaker 1: no brainer to any teachers out there, and certainly to
Speaker 1: any parents of children who are are still learning how
Speaker 1: to write. I mean, I've my son's been doing pretty well,
Speaker 1: but but I mean I've seen some real dogs of
Speaker 1: paragraphs when it comes to to putting things together, because
Speaker 1: you know, I have to remind myself. I've had to
Speaker 1: remind myself in these times. It's like, yeah, he he
Speaker 1: may he reads a lot and he's he gets to
Speaker 1: see a lot of well constructed paragraphs and paragraphs that
Speaker 1: are definitely doing their job within narrative works and so forth.
Speaker 1: But you've got to start somewhere. You've got to have
Speaker 1: like some sort of basic form in mind, especially when
Speaker 1: you're doing these very you know, wrote sort of assignments
Speaker 1: where it's all about constructing, stretching the sentences, forming those
Speaker 1: sentences into paragraphs, and having you know, X number of
Speaker 1: paragraphs to illustrate a basic concept.
Speaker 2: Yes, and in the defense of the five paragraph essay
Speaker 2: and and the Alexander Baynes style paragraph, uh, I would
Speaker 2: say that's useful for more than just producing a piece
Speaker 2: of writing somebody would actually want to read. It is
Speaker 2: useful for practicing organizing your own thoughts. I know I've
Speaker 2: said on the podcast before that I often feel like
Speaker 2: I don't really understand what I think about an issue
Speaker 2: often until I try to write about it. Writing is
Speaker 2: the process by which I realize which of my intuitions
Speaker 2: I do think are true and make sense, and which
Speaker 2: ones are not and I should just abandon It's writing
Speaker 2: for me is very much a process of figuring out
Speaker 2: what I really think and organizing those thoughts into a
Speaker 2: structure that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, I certainly agree with that. Oftentimes find myself
Speaker 1: in a situation where I have to write about a topic.
Speaker 1: My thoughts on the topic or just the general knowledge
Speaker 1: about that topic is kind of all over the place.
Speaker 1: But you got to start somewhere, And so just that
Speaker 1: first sentence, that first paragraph, that opening paragraph of a work,
Speaker 1: even if it's not the lead paragraph, you end up
Speaker 1: sticking with. Like that is often for me, Like that's
Speaker 1: kind of like staking a place in the ground. That's
Speaker 1: like where you begin to to actually trace out where
Speaker 1: you're going to build the rest of the thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you remember, a long time ago, we did an
Speaker 2: episode that I think back on fairly often about the
Speaker 2: illusion of explanatory depth, the psychology concept where you can
Speaker 2: think you understand how something works, but you actually don't
Speaker 2: until you are forced to try to explain it. Easy
Speaker 2: example for this is do you know how to draw
Speaker 2: a bicycle with all the parts? And everybody thinks they do,
Speaker 2: but you actually try to draw one, and like, I
Speaker 2: don't know what the percentage of people is, but a
Speaker 2: huge percentage of people actually they draw a bicycle that
Speaker 2: could not work, like they don't actually know what parts
Speaker 2: connect to what and everything. And the same is true
Speaker 2: for like a toilet tank or other things that we
Speaker 2: just think we understand how they work until we have
Speaker 2: to get explicit and into the details about it. And
Speaker 2: writing can be an exercise like that, Like trying to
Speaker 2: draw the bicycle, it helps you realize what you thought
Speaker 2: you understand or new, but don't. You don't actually, so
Speaker 2: now you've got to go back and figure things.
Speaker 1: Out right now.
Speaker 2: I was thinking about another difference between the you know,
Speaker 2: the lovely organic paragraph that sort of moves on its
Speaker 2: own terms and you can't really say what exactly the
Speaker 2: rules for its structure are, versus the Alexander bain style
Speaker 2: prescriptive topic sentence paragraph. And I think one difference is
Speaker 2: simply that these are achieving different goals. One is style
Speaker 2: and the other is clarity. And if, like a fiction book,
Speaker 2: we're full of Baines style paragraphs, I think that would
Speaker 2: obviously become very tedious and unpleasant to read. So, of
Speaker 2: course there's the idea that good prose stylists don't usually
Speaker 2: follow this format. And yet I can think of documents
Speaker 2: where I would much rather have the document read in
Speaker 2: an Alexander Bain style instead of having you know, sort
Speaker 2: of more loosey goosey organic paragraphs. And examples would be
Speaker 2: things like an article in a science journal or a
Speaker 2: medical article, or a legal document, or a list of
Speaker 2: instructions for building something, basically anywhere that clarity and logical
Speaker 2: organization are more important than style and energy and pleasure
Speaker 2: of reading. I think that the ban style structure is
Speaker 2: a good approach.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this is an interesting point, and it made
Speaker 1: me think of how I use a lot of texts
Speaker 1: for work and for research, because I think an interesting
Speaker 1: aspect of the text to think about here is skimmability
Speaker 1: for texts that are not expressly for pleasure. You know, certainly,
Speaker 1: if it's something I'm using for research purposes. In some cases,
Speaker 1: I read the entire book, you know, I've covered to cover.
Speaker 1: Other times, I'm in there to get specific things from
Speaker 1: that author. I know there's specific topics, or it's a
Speaker 1: specific part of a study that I'm interested in, and
Speaker 1: for that yeah, breaks in paragraph structure are pretty important
Speaker 1: because I need to be able to move around in
Speaker 1: that I'm not going to eat at all. I need
Speaker 1: to be able to pick out the things I want,
Speaker 1: and so it helps if those morsels are separated from
Speaker 1: each other on the platter.
Speaker 2: I think there are also these are the kind of
Speaker 2: documents that in many cases would benefit from being removed
Speaker 2: from the flowing prose style altogether and just become lists
Speaker 2: of bullet points.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean you see this as instructions, right,
Speaker 1: as simply guidelines and whatnot. They're generally not going to
Speaker 1: be arranged in multi paragraph form. It's going to be
Speaker 1: bullet points in numbers and also illustrations and so forth.
Speaker 1: But you do find this with recipes, I guess. But
Speaker 1: even then you'll have numbers or bullet points in there
Speaker 1: as well, so you can easily skip from this paragraph
Speaker 1: to this paragraph. So it's very clear on which step am.
Speaker 2: I on totally. I mean, I love organic flowing pros,
Speaker 2: but I don't want it in a recipe.
Speaker 1: But you will get it in your recipe on every
Speaker 1: recipe blog out there. And I think you often hear
Speaker 1: people grive about this, and I think it's because of
Speaker 1: that collision of two things. You'll often have an organic,
Speaker 1: organic paragraphs forming this this conversational blog post about a
Speaker 1: particular recipe about a particular drink or food culture, whatever
Speaker 1: it happens to be. But then this article also contains
Speaker 1: the recipe, a thing that is very much a situation
Speaker 1: where you want to go in, get what you need,
Speaker 1: jump in at the right step, and get out again.
Speaker 1: And if you're hit with both styles, I mean, that
Speaker 1: can be a little bit jarring.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially if it's not so I was going to
Speaker 2: qualify what I said with like, oh, okay, I can understand,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of a thing that's two parts. It's
Speaker 2: like the recipe as a list of instruct clear instructions
Speaker 2: with bullet points, and then above that like an article
Speaker 2: that explains in more detail. But it does get frustrating,
Speaker 2: like if it's not clear at first glance whether you
Speaker 2: need to read the article or not in order to
Speaker 2: make the recipe, You're like, am I going to be
Speaker 2: missing something if I don't read all this text right?
Speaker 1: And one of the problems I think with with blog
Speaker 1: posts is it comes down to formatting. Because if you
Speaker 1: have a really good book, like I have a few
Speaker 1: different books on cocktails, and those are often nice because
Speaker 1: they're very well formatted and you can easily see where
Speaker 1: is the cocktail recipe and where is the you know,
Speaker 1: the article, where's the prose about this cocktail or the
Speaker 1: history of the cocktail, et cetera. But if you're dealing
Speaker 1: with a blog format, I mean, there are some great
Speaker 1: blog templates out there, but you don't always have that
Speaker 1: much freedom, and you're often left doing something that is
Speaker 1: a little morelike blog post at the top, recipe at
Speaker 1: the bottom, or worse, I guess, is something where there
Speaker 1: is no distinction, where the recipe is just immersed within
Speaker 1: the more pros based blog post.
Speaker 2: So, in thinking about paragraphs and organization of pieces of writing,
Speaker 2: I was looking at an interesting article called the Music
Speaker 2: of Form, Rethinking Organization and Writing by Peter Elbow, which
Speaker 2: was published in College Composition and Communication in two thousand
Speaker 2: and six. And the main thing I wanted to mention
Speaker 2: from this Most of this essay is about Elbow talking
Speaker 2: about possibly thinking of writing as analogous to music and
Speaker 2: having music style organizational techniques. But I want to start
Speaker 2: with this metaphor. So Elbow describes a painting. He uses
Speaker 2: the example of Edward Hopper's Night Hawks and says, you know, okay,
Speaker 2: we're humans. We're able to stand several feet back from
Speaker 2: this painting and see it as a whole. Right, you
Speaker 2: can just look at it. You can see the whole thing,
Speaker 2: and you can understand it as a composition of different
Speaker 2: parts that emerges from how they all come together at once.
Speaker 2: But then he says, okay, now take the same painting
Speaker 2: and imagine instead that you are an ant. You can
Speaker 2: only look at the painting a little bit at a
Speaker 2: time by crawling over the surface of it, and thus
Speaker 2: your idea of the whole painting has to come together
Speaker 2: a little bit at a time and involves your use
Speaker 2: of memory of what parts you previously looked at, and
Speaker 2: probably also some imagination of what parts you haven't looked
Speaker 2: at yet. And then Elbow writes quote, when we read
Speaker 2: a text, we are like the ant. The text is
Speaker 2: laid out in space across multiple pages, but we can
Speaker 2: only read one small part at a time. We may
Speaker 2: jump around the text Grasshopper like, especially with long texts,
Speaker 2: looking at chapter titles and other headings, browsing the openings
Speaker 2: and closings of chapters looking for quote perspective. Some texts
Speaker 2: lead off with an abstract, as this journal now asks.
Speaker 2: Books have tables of contents, but still we can take
Speaker 2: in relatively few words at a time. So here's my question.
Speaker 2: If texts are spatial phenomena, and yet our experience of
Speaker 2: them is necessarily tim porrel, how can we best organize
Speaker 2: texts for readers? How could we organize paintings for ants?
Speaker 1: This is great. I love this way of thinking about it,
Speaker 1: the ant crawling over the painting, trying to form this
Speaker 1: idea of what the painting looks like. And I think
Speaker 1: that gets down to one of the problems of thinking, Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going to find that great paragraph in that book.
Speaker 1: I love because no paragraph, for the most part. There
Speaker 1: may be some exceptions, and maybe I can think of
Speaker 1: one or two, but they're so rare. For the most part,
Speaker 1: the paragraph, any given paragraph, is not a miniaturization of
Speaker 1: the larger work, and cannot properly convey the idea of
Speaker 1: the larger work. Right.
Speaker 2: I thought this metaphor was so interesting because it's true,
Speaker 2: and that, like a lot of the stuff people do,
Speaker 2: you like. Conventions of writing, like the Alexander Baynes style
Speaker 2: paragraph or the five paragraph essay and a composition class
Speaker 2: are designed to give you a structure that would help
Speaker 2: an ant understand what the whole painting is even after
Speaker 2: even while they're only you know, crawling over a bit
Speaker 2: of it at a time, because it's so familiar. You
Speaker 2: know what the structure is, you know where you are
Speaker 2: within it at any given time, you know roughly what
Speaker 2: the whole thing's going to look like, and that that
Speaker 2: type of mapping or sign posting does provide some some
Speaker 2: perspective to you know, the ant crawling over the painting
Speaker 2: or the human being reading a text. And yet they
Speaker 2: come with disadvantages, and Elbow identifies a number of them,
Speaker 2: but one he talks about is the idea of energy.
Speaker 2: Like that a text with good organic paragraphs that are
Speaker 2: not organized in such a you know, mapped out and
Speaker 2: signposted way, they tend to have more more power to
Speaker 2: pull you along and make you want to keep reading
Speaker 2: and feel more like music, have those kind of interesting
Speaker 2: little melodies and themes that recur. He calls this other style,
Speaker 2: you know, the non signposted style, dynamic organization. And one
Speaker 2: interesting comparison that he makes is that his dynamic organization
Speaker 2: can have not just style advantages. It's not just more
Speaker 2: interesting and pleasant to read kind of organic paragraphs that
Speaker 2: are not so signposted. It can have a revelatory power
Speaker 2: of its own. It can actually show you things that
Speaker 2: a well mapped, signposted paragraph or essay cannot. And the
Speaker 2: example he uses is a comparison to platonic dialogues. This
Speaker 2: comes from an author named Burke writing about Plato's dialogue
Speaker 2: the Phadrus, and Burke writes the following quote for a
Speaker 2: platonic dialogue is not formed simply by breaking an idea
Speaker 2: into its component parts and taking them up in a
Speaker 2: one two three order, the purely scholastic aspect. In Aristotle's
Speaker 2: method of exposition, a platonic dialogue is rather a process
Speaker 2: of transformation, whereby the position at the end transcends the
Speaker 2: position at the start, so that the position at the
Speaker 2: start can eventually be seen in terms of the new
Speaker 2: motivation encountered on route. And I think that that's a
Speaker 2: great point of comparison, because a lot of good writing
Speaker 2: has the quality of following the author's thoughts, so we're
Speaker 2: not just seeing like a presentation of pre approved informational tidbits,
Speaker 2: you know, arranged into paragraph form, but we are actually
Speaker 2: discovered the author is showing us something about how they
Speaker 2: come to an idea, they get from here to there.
Speaker 2: They're taking us along the way with them, and that
Speaker 2: can be just as enlightening as a clearly organized list
Speaker 2: of conclusions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and of course the style is going to inform
Speaker 1: so much of how you understand the inner workings of
Speaker 1: an author's mind and how you connect with it. Like,
Speaker 1: for instance, Borges is going to have a totally different
Speaker 1: feel for his paragraphs compared to Hunter S. Thompson. One.
Speaker 1: With Thompson's paragraphs, there's more of this sort of crackling
Speaker 1: live wire intensity to them, directing one thought to the next,
Speaker 1: whereas Borjes is gonna he's gonna take his time, and
Speaker 1: he's it's more like a like like a like a
Speaker 1: vapor drifting through a wing of a library. Uh and
Speaker 1: uh and and so they're they're totally different experiences, and
Speaker 1: they're giving you a snapshot into the way connections are
Speaker 1: forming in the author's minds.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, sure, I mean, I guess I've mainly now
Speaker 2: been thinking about nonfiction writing, but you get into fiction, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's a totally different ballgame. Also, But anyway, a lot
Speaker 2: of this essay seems to play on this metaphor of
Speaker 2: music and how you could think about UH writing as
Speaker 2: as analogous to music in various ways, and how that
Speaker 2: also helps you think about compromises between the the highly organized,
Speaker 2: sign posted structure of like the five paragraph essay versus
Speaker 2: the dynamic organization of the organic paragraph, and how you
Speaker 2: can you can blend them together to to to have
Speaker 2: maximum effect.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's this great bit from Elbow and I read
Speaker 1: here quote whole texts need larger global pieces of energy.
Speaker 1: It's not enough if paragraphs or sections hold together and
Speaker 1: pull us through from one to another. We also need
Speaker 1: a sense of the whole as whole, a matter that
Speaker 1: Williams treats. But very briefly, this energy comes from the
Speaker 1: same forces that hold music together, sequences of expectation and
Speaker 1: eventual satisfaction, larger melodic or harmonic rhythms, or examples of
Speaker 1: what I am calling the music of form. So yeah,
Speaker 1: this interests me because the author here mentions the use
Speaker 1: of story thinking at times, and this brought to mind
Speaker 1: the formulate nature of most storytelling and fiction weaving endeavors.
Speaker 1: You know, certain structures are going to be followed, certain
Speaker 1: tropes are going to be invoked, and this does present
Speaker 1: a kind of form that pulls us along. For instance,
Speaker 1: many of the movies we discussed on Weird House Cinema
Speaker 1: follow very expected structures and invoke expected elements, And while
Speaker 1: this certainly can make a movie doing experience feel too formulaic,
Speaker 1: in some cases, it can also provide the necessary pull.
Speaker 1: The genre trappings can often serve as a kind of
Speaker 1: airport conveyor belt that makes it easier to move through
Speaker 1: the work. You put up with the humdrum human interactions
Speaker 1: because you know that genre it demands that some of
Speaker 1: these humans are about to be eaten by a monster
Speaker 1: or knifed in the back by a slash, or whatever
Speaker 1: the case may be, and that may be the aspect
Speaker 1: you're far more interested in. Also playing into the idea
Speaker 1: of expectation in music, I mean this brings me back
Speaker 1: to some of our past discussions of music, that it's
Speaker 1: not only about expectations being met, but expectations being subverted.
Speaker 1: So you think that the next note is going to
Speaker 1: do this, but then it does that, and that's what
Speaker 1: makes it fabulous, And that too, is one of the
Speaker 1: great things in film, but also in writing, like it's
Speaker 1: the beat that you think is coming, the rhyme that
Speaker 1: you think is coming, or whatever the case may be,
Speaker 1: it ends up being something else instead. And if you
Speaker 1: if you tease it apart and tear it apart, that
Speaker 1: may seem more mundane, but in the actual experience of
Speaker 1: the thing it can be it can just give you chills.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that that is one way in
Speaker 2: which reading and music are very similar. I mean elbows
Speaker 2: correct that you know, you can only sort of experience
Speaker 2: them in a linear way, like one moment at a time.
Speaker 2: You can't hear a whole piece of music at once
Speaker 2: or read a whole piece of writing at once. And
Speaker 2: so it's that process of having to go through one
Speaker 2: bit at a time in a linear way that makes
Speaker 2: these prediction subversion patterns so important. It's something about creating
Speaker 2: a great piece of music or a great piece of
Speaker 2: writing has to do with finding the right balance of
Speaker 2: meeting expectations and then subverting expectations.
Speaker 1: Like just just to come back to to to be
Speaker 1: movies for a second, Like sometimes the subversion that works
Speaker 1: is accidental. Sometimes it's the fact that the monster jumps
Speaker 1: out and doesn't look right. That looked like the effect
Speaker 1: doesn't work like that is not the subversion that the
Speaker 1: filmmakers were going for. If left of their own devices
Speaker 1: and being if they were able to achieve everything they
Speaker 1: wanted to achieve, it may have not. The finished work
Speaker 1: may not have been that different from the works that
Speaker 1: inspired it. But sometimes just an error in style or
Speaker 1: a weirdness of effect can subvert expectations in a way
Speaker 1: that makes it memorable. Like Jason takes Manhattan when the
Speaker 1: mask finally comes off and he looks a little little weird,
Speaker 1: a little arly. Yeah, like that, that's memorable because that's
Speaker 1: not really what you were expecting based on previous experiences
Speaker 1: with the form, with the with the Jason movie, and
Speaker 1: what an unmasking has previously been.
Speaker 2: I don't think they made him cute on purpose. I
Speaker 2: think that was a that was a felicitous accident. Yeah, Rob,
Speaker 2: did you tell me before we started recording that you
Speaker 2: found a book with no paragraph breaks in it?
Speaker 1: Yes? Yes, this morning, in fact, I was looking around
Speaker 1: on my bookshelf and I was asking myself, Okay, which
Speaker 1: of these has some great paragraphs? And it's got to
Speaker 1: be another great paragraph, another great intro paragraph, and I
Speaker 1: did find a nice intro paragraph in another Alan Robe
Speaker 1: Grulet book. But I also realized, oh, I do own
Speaker 1: a book that has I think no paragraph breaks in
Speaker 1: the text itself, and it achieves this through It's kind
Speaker 1: of cheating, I guess. But it is a book you
Speaker 1: might be familiar with, Joe. It's titled one hundred and
Speaker 1: four Stories by Thomas Bernard, the Voice Imitator. So Thomas
Speaker 1: Bernard in this book is writing short shorts. These are
Speaker 1: very short stories. They are all, as far as I
Speaker 1: can tell and remember, one paragraph long. The paragraphs range
Speaker 1: and size. Some of them are rather lengthy paragraphs, some
Speaker 1: of them are very short. But in every case I
Speaker 1: believe the paragraph is the complete story. Therefore, there are
Speaker 1: not really paragraph breaks within each work. Now, there are
Speaker 1: certainly paragraph breaks between works, but each story itself has
Speaker 1: no paragraph breaks.
Speaker 2: Okay, So you can look at this as a work
Speaker 2: with no paragraph breaks or work with extreme paragraph breaks
Speaker 2: where every break is the end of the text.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah. Like, just to give an example, this
Speaker 1: is certainly a book worth picking up if anyone out
Speaker 1: there is interested in short shorts as a form, which
Speaker 1: I do find quite fascinating because at times, especially when
Speaker 1: I'm getting into Borges, I keep thinking, well, it's the
Speaker 1: shorter works that are really the ones that resonate with
Speaker 1: me the most. You know, some sort of like Philip K.
Speaker 1: Dick's story that just is about a little idea, and
Speaker 1: so this is kind of the extreme form of it.
Speaker 1: But for example, there is a story in here titled
Speaker 1: Hotel Vauldhaus, and this is the complete story one paragraph.
Speaker 1: We had no luck with the weather, and the guests
Speaker 1: at our table were repellent in every respect, been spoiled,
Speaker 1: niedts she for us. Even after they had had a
Speaker 1: fatal car accident and had been laid out in the
Speaker 1: church in Sills, we still hated them. Complete story.
Speaker 2: Well, that reminds me. So there's another author I've been
Speaker 2: reading recently who I love, who also has some very
Speaker 2: short short stories named Lydia Davis. Do you know Lydia David?
Speaker 1: I don't think I know that one though. Oh.
Speaker 2: She writes a lot of like really great, excruciatingly observed
Speaker 2: relationship stories that are just full of like horrible, grown
Speaker 2: inducing details and dynamics, but they're wonderful. She's a great writer,
Speaker 2: and she has a lot of single paragraph stories that
Speaker 2: are really good nice.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I guess it comes down to yea, depending
Speaker 1: on how you shake it and depending on how you
Speaker 1: discuss paragraphs. There are works out there that have no
Speaker 1: paragraph breaks. But but yeah, the the extreme interpretation of
Speaker 1: that would just be works I guess that are just
Speaker 1: big vomit of just a big bolus of of work
Speaker 1: of words, words and symbols, right, I mean it just
Speaker 1: when you lose the form, you lose the message, Like
Speaker 1: the format is part of the communication. Is just something
Speaker 1: I keep coming back to and thinking about this topic.
Speaker 2: Okay, So if somebody was teaching something you wrote in
Speaker 2: a classroom, you wouldn't want you would not want them
Speaker 2: to go in and insert paragraph breaks where you did
Speaker 2: not have them.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know, I don't I would guess
Speaker 1: throw them in if you need to.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, no, I see what you're saying. Then it
Speaker 2: is part of the message. But you're not gonna be
Speaker 2: so precious that you couldn't add a few extra right.
Speaker 1: Well. I think part of this exploration in paragraphs has
Speaker 1: made me question that the use of paragraph breaks and
Speaker 1: other works, especially older works like I really kind of
Speaker 1: took it for granted, you know, some some paragraphs are long,
Speaker 1: summer short. I didn't really think that about the idea
Speaker 1: of even breaking them up. And now I'm looking back
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking, well, you know, Borhees has going a
Speaker 1: little long in this opening paragraph to this story. And
Speaker 1: indeed he does go pretty His paragraphs tend to be
Speaker 1: kind of chonky, especially some of the opening paragraphs. But
Speaker 1: I'm not saying I would break up his text. It's
Speaker 1: not my place. But I guess if someone came around
Speaker 1: and broke some of my text up, I would be like, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's probably better. You probably probably improved it. Hey.
Speaker 2: So we got to end with a call to the
Speaker 2: listeners here because there was something we were curious about
Speaker 2: that we couldn't really find good answers to, which is,
Speaker 2: are there languages where paragraph organization is significantly different than
Speaker 2: it is like in English that we're familiar with bilingual
Speaker 2: listeners who read and write in other non English languages,
Speaker 2: any interesting differences in how paragraphs are used in those languages,
Speaker 2: or is there a language without paragraphs at all that
Speaker 2: you can tell us about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wasn't able to find any good answers on
Speaker 1: this myself looking around there weren't there weren't any discussions
Speaker 1: about it. I certainly I didn't see it addressed in
Speaker 1: any papers. So yeah, I would love to hear from
Speaker 1: anyone out there who can speak to this. It seems
Speaker 1: like it seems like the answer is yes, there are
Speaker 1: things like paragraphs or paragraphs in other languages. And I
Speaker 1: didn't see anything about there being particular language traditions today
Speaker 1: where there are no paragraphs, but maybe there are. Maybe
Speaker 1: I missed something, So definitely write in and let us know,
Speaker 1: tell us, And certainly the call remains open paragraphs that
Speaker 1: you love in particular works, especially again, I'm fascinated by
Speaker 1: opening paragraphs, and part of that is like thinking, like
Speaker 1: newspapery about things that this is the hook. This is
Speaker 1: the thing that you are presenting the reader with to
Speaker 1: get them to keep going. So what is the opening dish?
Speaker 1: What is the appetizer that will make us remain seated
Speaker 1: for the remainder of the meal? If you have great
Speaker 1: examples of that, write in let us know. Or perhaps
Speaker 1: there are some other works out there you can think
Speaker 1: of in which there are no paragraph breaks. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you would like to check out other episodes of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind. You will find them and
Speaker 1: these Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed Core episodes
Speaker 1: come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays Short Form Artifact or
Speaker 1: Monster Factor, so it's come out on Wednesdays. On Mondays,
Speaker 1: we do listener mail. On Fridays we do Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 1: That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and
Speaker 1: just talk about a strange film.
Speaker 2: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 2: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 2: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 2: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
Speaker 2: say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
Speaker 2: to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 2: Mind is production of iHeartRadio.
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