Speaker 1: My Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And in today's episode, I wanted to take a look
Speaker 1: at a writing convention, and that is the paragraph or
Speaker 1: the paragraph break. I think there was a single moment
Speaker 1: of genesis in my desire to do this episode, and
Speaker 1: it's that, Uh, you know, some number of weeks back,
Speaker 1: I was doing research for some episode and I ended
Speaker 1: up looking up an archived plane text version of an
Speaker 1: old book. Rob I'm sure you've had this issue on
Speaker 1: the show before. So you get plain text and the
Speaker 1: text is there, but all the original paragraph breaks are
Speaker 1: messed up, like they're they're either in the wrong place
Speaker 1: or there are no breaks, and I was like trying
Speaker 1: to read it. I was just like, this is horrible.
Speaker 1: I hate this. Even though the whole text is here,
Speaker 1: I'm basically incapable of reading it. Somehow, the existence of
Speaker 1: paragraphs with reasonable breaks is what makes a massive text
Speaker 1: physically consumable to me, right and and certainly if it
Speaker 1: is supposed to be paragraphs, is supposed to have paragraph
Speaker 1: breaks in it. Um It's like if someone were to
Speaker 1: bring a seven course meal to you and say here,
Speaker 1: here it is in stew form. Um, please enjoy it.
Speaker 1: I mean. And it hasn't been blended up in this
Speaker 1: scenario at all. So it's not like it is it
Speaker 1: is garbled. All of it is still there. But here
Speaker 1: it is without the little breaks. Here it is just
Speaker 1: all you know, either either in the same pot or
Speaker 1: even just mashed together on the same plate. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: I want these We need these breaks between these different
Speaker 1: things that we're going to consume. Uh, there needs to
Speaker 1: be an order to to what is occurring, right, Why
Speaker 1: not just put the tierramisiou in the clam chowder and
Speaker 1: then you get it all at once? Um? Yeah. And
Speaker 1: so this got me thinking about paragraphs in general, and
Speaker 1: wondering about where they come from historically, and why we
Speaker 1: build them the way that we do, if there even
Speaker 1: is a consistent way that we build them, and all
Speaker 1: kinds of questions like this, And one thing I thought
Speaker 1: might be interesting to get us kicked off today is
Speaker 1: to just talk about the literary effect, the effect on
Speaker 1: the reader when you're reading a book with a lot
Speaker 1: of long paragraphs versus short paragraphs. Like, how does that
Speaker 1: change the experience of reading and the impression created. I'm
Speaker 1: sure other people have different ways of answering this, but
Speaker 1: one immediate distinction I thought of in my own reading
Speaker 1: experience has to do with the feeling of substance versus
Speaker 1: the feeling of momentum, and I would explain it like this.
Speaker 1: When I think about good books with very short paragraphs,
Speaker 1: I tend to think about readability and hooky noess. Like
Speaker 1: you know, airport thriller novels. They tend have very short paragraphs,
Speaker 1: and those short paragraphs are I think effective for what
Speaker 1: they're meant to do. That they tend to make the
Speaker 1: text easy to read. They make it feel like it's
Speaker 1: fast moving and inviting. It wants to keep you reading,
Speaker 1: making you less likely to put the book down. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: when I think about good books with very long paragraphs,
Speaker 1: I tend to think about literary richness, like obsessive observation
Speaker 1: or description or insight texts that feel like they are
Speaker 1: packed with detail and texture and thoughtfulness. Um So, in
Speaker 1: trying to like balance out those two different advantages you
Speaker 1: get from different paragraph links, I came up with a
Speaker 1: kind of perhaps silly metaphor but I started thinking about
Speaker 1: trips to bring groceries in from the car. You know,
Speaker 1: you ever go out shopping, you have a bunch of
Speaker 1: different things, and you can, you know, you can take
Speaker 1: one or two bags each time, or you can try
Speaker 1: to do everything in one go, but sometimes that's impossible
Speaker 1: and you have to stop halfway to the door. So
Speaker 1: like when you're paragraphs are too short, it's almost like
Speaker 1: you're trying to bring the groceries in one item at
Speaker 1: a time. Something just starts to feel kind of insubstantial
Speaker 1: and absurd about what you're doing. But if paragraphs are
Speaker 1: too long, that's kind of like trying to bring everything
Speaker 1: in in one trip and you just stop, like you
Speaker 1: have to put it down and decide, okay, I can't
Speaker 1: do this. So you're kind of balancing mobility, the mobility
Speaker 1: of carrying less with the substance of carrying more. I
Speaker 1: think that's a good That's an interesting way of thinking
Speaker 1: about it. That's certainly because because the other side of
Speaker 1: that is I'm instantly thinking of the person that is
Speaker 1: obscenely trying to carry all the groceries in in one go,
Speaker 1: like you know, and I've I've I think I've tried
Speaker 1: to do this before. Where you're you're just you have
Speaker 1: multiple grocery bag straps on each hand, you have something
Speaker 1: on your arm cradling something. Yeah, and then yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess you're planning on opening the door with your foot
Speaker 1: or just slamming into it or hoping there's somebody on
Speaker 1: the other side to help you in. And here's the thing,
Speaker 1: as the reader, like I'm either the door or I'm
Speaker 1: the person on the other side of the scenario, and
Speaker 1: you just would want to be like, calm down a
Speaker 1: little bit, like I bought the book, or I I
Speaker 1: rented the book, or I borrowed the book from the library,
Speaker 1: whatever the case may be. We can get to all this.
Speaker 1: We don't have to have it all in the first paragraph, right.
Speaker 1: And this is not I think this is not unique
Speaker 1: to modern readers. I mean people who are writing handbooks
Speaker 1: of composition and rhetoric in in centuries past warn that
Speaker 1: overly long paragraphs have the effect of quote over taxing
Speaker 1: the reader. There's something about unbroken blocks of text that
Speaker 1: just gets tiresome, and somehow, even though the text continues
Speaker 1: either way, just putting more breaks in between, separating that
Speaker 1: in the smaller chunks. Smaller paragraphs somehow makes the text
Speaker 1: feel lighter and like you're just sort of like skipping
Speaker 1: over it at a you know, at a breezy pace,
Speaker 1: as opposed to getting bogged down and feeling this weight.
Speaker 1: I was looking around for different writings on paragraphs and
Speaker 1: I actually came across the night paper titled writing Paragraphs
Speaker 1: by Tolkien at all uh, and it's it is j R.
Speaker 1: Tolkien himself and wow, weird. Weirdly enough, one of the
Speaker 1: co authors was a professor at Memphis State in Tennessee. Uh.
Speaker 1: I didn't get to the bottom of how these individuals
Speaker 1: all come together on being credit on the same paper,
Speaker 1: but it gets into some of the basics and challenges
Speaker 1: and goals of of teaching effective writing. But even in
Speaker 1: this paper, the authors point out that the unity of
Speaker 1: a given paragraph is often illusory. A longer paragraph, they
Speaker 1: point out, can often be broken into without upsetting anything.
Speaker 1: And they point out, for instance, this is often done
Speaker 1: at the spirits, certainly at the editing phase and newspapers. Uh.
Speaker 1: The the author wrote a paragraph it's a little bit
Speaker 1: too long looking on the screen, you just shop that
Speaker 1: sucker in half. And a lot of times you can
Speaker 1: do that without any ill effect, And likewise they point
Speaker 1: out that the reverse is true. In many cases. You
Speaker 1: can take shorter paragraphs and kind of combine them together
Speaker 1: and you're not going do effectively break anything. So that's
Speaker 1: I think that's something interesting to keep in mind, even
Speaker 1: though at the same time they are acknowledging that, yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of paragraph writing is about Okay, here's your
Speaker 1: this is the stuff we all learn in school, right
Speaker 1: here is our our topic sentence. Then we have supporting sentences,
Speaker 1: and the paragraph is supposed to be this one concise
Speaker 1: nugget of thought for us to consume. Well, that's a
Speaker 1: great transition to the next thing I wanted to get out,
Speaker 1: which is that you know, of course we're talking about
Speaker 1: reporting our subjective feelings as a reader on you know,
Speaker 1: reading paragraphs of different links. But the other side of
Speaker 1: the approach to paragraphs is the more prescriptive approach. You know,
Speaker 1: here's what a paragraph must do, with the most famous
Speaker 1: or uh if you like, infamous prescription being that a
Speaker 1: paragraph must develop a single idea, and that idea must
Speaker 1: be announced near the beginning of the paragraph in a
Speaker 1: topic sentence, and then there must be supporting sentences. Uh,
Speaker 1: and you know, we can talk more about the prescriptive
Speaker 1: idea of the paragraph later, I guess. But anyway, I
Speaker 1: find it interesting to consider the surface level paradox that
Speaker 1: paragraphs are absolutely essential to most modern readers. I think
Speaker 1: you and I are probably not unique in this. Like
Speaker 1: the prospect of reading a book or even a long
Speaker 1: article that's just a single, unbroken block of text makes
Speaker 1: my blood run cold. I could not do it. And
Speaker 1: yet it is difficult to explain exactly what the rules
Speaker 1: are for creating paragraphs like they're essential, but but attempts
Speaker 1: to codify them in a universal way are, I would argue,
Speaker 1: and I think we will argue later on pretty much
Speaker 1: universally failures at at least at describing the way paragraphs
Speaker 1: are actually used in popular writing. You know, so, questions
Speaker 1: about where do we break the line and why are
Speaker 1: in some ways still kind of elusive, even though breaking
Speaker 1: the line is a must. Now. I don't know how
Speaker 1: successful this will be, but I did at think is
Speaker 1: it possible to mention favorite paragraph breaks and writing? I
Speaker 1: was struggling to have any like Obviously, I have a
Speaker 1: lot of bits of writing that are a paragraph, But um,
Speaker 1: I was struggling to think of examples where the break
Speaker 1: of the paragraph is what I admire in the writing,
Speaker 1: as essential as it is to a piece of writing
Speaker 1: as a whole. Yeah, I was once you brought this up.
Speaker 1: I was thinking on and I'm on my own here,
Speaker 1: and I was thinking, well, okay, what are what are
Speaker 1: bits that stand out to me in writing? And I
Speaker 1: found that a lot of times the things that come
Speaker 1: to me the easiest are opening lines or sometimes closing
Speaker 1: lines from from novels, and a lot of those A
Speaker 1: lot of the time, if not all the time. It's
Speaker 1: super short. It's often not even perhaps a true clinical
Speaker 1: paragraph in that in that it is actually just one line.
Speaker 1: And like a couple of examples that I instantly thought
Speaker 1: of Dante's Inferno as a great one in them. And
Speaker 1: of course we're getting into poetry here, we're getting into stances,
Speaker 1: but uh, it's effectively a in tents in the middle
Speaker 1: of the journey of our life. I came to myself
Speaker 1: in a dark wood for the straight way was lost.
Speaker 1: An even better example, and this is from an actual novel.
Speaker 1: This is from Alan rogue Grils The Voyeur. It just
Speaker 1: begins with a short sentence. It was as if no
Speaker 1: one had heard. And I always loved that one because
Speaker 1: it's so evocative, like what what is the thing that
Speaker 1: no one had had heard? Why had they not heard it?
Speaker 1: And who is making or what is making the sound
Speaker 1: like it? It asked so many questions that I have
Speaker 1: to keep moving. Another good one Fahrenheit four fifty one
Speaker 1: by Ray brad Berry. It was a pleasure to burn.
Speaker 1: Oh that's interesting, So these pros works. I've read these,
Speaker 1: but I uh I did not recall the the opening
Speaker 1: paragraphs being a single line. Yeah. A couple of other
Speaker 1: ones that came to mind. Uh nearrom Answer by William Gibson.
Speaker 1: The sky above the port was the color of television
Speaker 1: turned to a dead channel. Or this is a famous
Speaker 1: one as well, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Speaker 1: by Hunter S. Thompson. We were somewhere around are still
Speaker 1: on the edge of the desert when the drugs began
Speaker 1: to take hold. Uh yeah, that's that's another good one.
Speaker 1: So you're a fan of the the short, possibly single
Speaker 1: sentence opening paragraph in fiction at least? Yeah, Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: something about this, like that one line. It's really they're
Speaker 1: really either either. It really makes me think and establishes
Speaker 1: kind of a vibe, or in some cases it establishes
Speaker 1: a different definite setting or scenario, whether succinctly. For instance,
Speaker 1: the Gibson one to a certain is really more about vibe.
Speaker 1: Um the Voyeur quote is more about vibe. The Hunter S.
Speaker 1: Thompson one is vibe and setting. It gives you a
Speaker 1: sense of where we're going and sort of what is
Speaker 1: going on. I was, obviously I'm a big fan of Dune,
Speaker 1: so I thought, well, what was the first line of
Speaker 1: doing I can't remember it off the top of my head.
Speaker 1: There if you skip past the quote from from the Princess, uh,
Speaker 1: the first line is in the week before their departure
Speaker 1: to Aracus, when all the final scurrying about had reached
Speaker 1: a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit
Speaker 1: the mother of the boy Paul. Now that's that's not
Speaker 1: a paragraph that I would just say, oh, I put
Speaker 1: that on a T shirt for me, or or can
Speaker 1: I have that inscribed in my flesh? But it is
Speaker 1: a great, a great opening, the opening line that just
Speaker 1: establishes exactly what is going on and gives you, you know,
Speaker 1: it gives you some mystery. I guess you don't know
Speaker 1: what Iracus is at this point, and you were instantly wondering, well,
Speaker 1: who is this old crone? And it sets the story
Speaker 1: and it does a good job of just just having
Speaker 1: dived directly into the action. Really, but I couldn't remember
Speaker 1: or just looking around really quickly find an example of
Speaker 1: a of a multi sentence paragraph. Uh, particularly an opening
Speaker 1: paragraph from a work that I held to a really
Speaker 1: high standard. I don't know how about you, Joe. I'm
Speaker 1: sure if I had more time thinking about this, I
Speaker 1: could come up with good examples. But but I have not,
Speaker 1: because again, I think paragraph breaks are essential, but I
Speaker 1: have not scrutinized individual breaks enough that it that they
Speaker 1: really like. Stick with me. There there's something that is essential,
Speaker 1: but they mostly to me become invisible in a text.
Speaker 1: I don't remember where the line breaks happen. Usually, Yeah,
Speaker 1: if a paragraph is is put together effectively and it's
Speaker 1: doing its job, you don't notice. That's one of the
Speaker 1: things about it. Uh, it's it's it's I've never had
Speaker 1: the experience of reading something to think, yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: great place for a paragraph break. I might think the
Speaker 1: other the opposite of that, I might think, couldn't we
Speaker 1: have broken this up a little bit more, Um, Frank
Speaker 1: Herbert or whoever I'm happening to read, And it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily I was thinking about this as well, like what
Speaker 1: is the experience of reading a text that is not
Speaker 1: just one big breakless paragraph but has but does have
Speaker 1: some rather expansive paragraphs. I find that sometimes when I'm
Speaker 1: looking at this page, I still have a gut instinct
Speaker 1: that it looks like work, Like you know what I'm saying, Like,
Speaker 1: even though the thing is, if it's a book that
Speaker 1: I'm even halfway interested in, it's not like big paragraphs
Speaker 1: are a stumbling block to me. It's not like I
Speaker 1: get lost in them or I'm not going to finish them.
Speaker 1: It's not like I need to to, you know, artificially
Speaker 1: throwing paragraph breaks from my own reading. Uh. It works
Speaker 1: just fine. But there's something maybe it's like a call
Speaker 1: back to uh, to early reading experiences, but they're sort
Speaker 1: of that initial uh impact in my psyche where it's like,
Speaker 1: these paragraphs are too long? What is this author doing? Oh?
Speaker 1: This is funny though, because inserting your own paragraph breaks
Speaker 1: in the work of an author who otherwise creates really
Speaker 1: unholy chunks. Uh. This is something that some like teachers
Speaker 1: actually do, and one specific writer I was reading for
Speaker 1: this episode talks about doing so. One of the main
Speaker 1: things I was reading in preparation for this was a
Speaker 1: great essay by a scholar named Richard Hughes Gibson called
Speaker 1: Past Lives of the Paragraph which was published in the
Speaker 1: Hedgehog Review. That's an interdisciplinary culture journal based out of
Speaker 1: the University of Virginia. And I'll refer back to this
Speaker 1: article several times in the episode, but towards the end
Speaker 1: of his article, Gibson tells a story about how several
Speaker 1: years back he was um trying to prepare reading for students. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this was by a critic who, uh, well, I'll
Speaker 1: just hear read from from what Gibson writes, quote said
Speaker 1: critic had a pension for composing labyrinthine paragraphs, which I
Speaker 1: now realized would quickly exhaust my students. Although I felt
Speaker 1: a tinge of compunction about tampering with those paragraphs, I
Speaker 1: set to work and, knowing this was the only way
Speaker 1: of salvaging the reading. The breaks came easily, though, and
Speaker 1: I soon found the work enjoyable. I was seeing the
Speaker 1: piece in a new way, and I quote discovered several
Speaker 1: remarkable sentences that I had overlooked while navigating my way
Speaker 1: through the labyrinths UH. And then he also says that
Speaker 1: this did indeed make the this article much more enjoyable
Speaker 1: for the students, and he just started doing it in
Speaker 1: all his other classes. When somebody has huge paragraphs, he
Speaker 1: would just go in and edit them to add in
Speaker 1: paragraph breaks and you could see. So, I don't know,
Speaker 1: an author might be mad to find out somebody was
Speaker 1: doing that to their work, but you can also clearly
Speaker 1: see the advantage. Yeah, yeah, it may. It does make
Speaker 1: me wonder if there are new editions of books that
Speaker 1: come out that that engage in this, or is it
Speaker 1: considered forbidden? You know, I don't know, I'd be I'd
Speaker 1: be very curious to hear about this. Um. I was.
Speaker 1: When I was looking around for some other info about this,
Speaker 1: I did run across UH a paper title but how
Speaker 1: to write a thesis according to umberto Echo by umberto Echo,
Speaker 1: And in it he briefly touches on the paragraph UH,
Speaker 1: and he U he writes the following quote begin new paragraphs.
Speaker 1: Often do so when logically necessary and when the pace
Speaker 1: of the text requires it. But the more you do it,
Speaker 1: the better. That's funny because Echo has a tendency to
Speaker 1: write some really long paragraphs. But I mean, in his
Speaker 1: in his defense, a lot of his long paragraphs are
Speaker 1: full of exactly that quality of richness that I was
Speaker 1: mentioning earlier, Like the long paragraphs feel substantial old, They're
Speaker 1: full of detail and insight. Yeah. This, of course, I
Speaker 1: was thinking about other authors that I've really loved over
Speaker 1: the years, and I started thinking about Cormick McCarthy, of course,
Speaker 1: who is often very succinct, especially in his later works.
Speaker 1: So really most of his works past, like the first
Speaker 1: novel um its Name leaves me at the moment, but
Speaker 1: his first novel is a little bit denser. But but
Speaker 1: but a lot of his later work, especially with more
Speaker 1: recent work, is often characterized by being just you know,
Speaker 1: very succinct short sentences, uh no quotation marks. But occasionally
Speaker 1: you get a nice like super run on long sentence
Speaker 1: that is essentially like a big paragraph that is almost
Speaker 1: the opposite of what we're talking about here, where it
Speaker 1: just keeps going and going, but at the same time
Speaker 1: it has a rhythm to it and uh, an intensity
Speaker 1: and the mere fact that it won't end is like
Speaker 1: like it's like a crazed thought being poured directly into
Speaker 1: your brain and you can't quite turn it off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: long paragraphs can definitely lend themselves to a kind of obsessive,
Speaker 1: immersive or stream of consciousness quality to the text. It's, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, when you are like stuck deep in somebody
Speaker 1: else's brain and you're not coming up for air, that
Speaker 1: that's often going to be a long paragraph. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's almost like there's a conversational aspect to
Speaker 1: paragraph breaks, like this is the amount of of text
Speaker 1: that is occurring before the speaker pauses, has a sip
Speaker 1: of their beverage. Gives you an opportunity to to think
Speaker 1: or say something in return. But it's just that paragraph.
Speaker 1: Then perhaps you're being preached at thank thank um, I
Speaker 1: was thinking of I also was thinking, Okay, obviously, paragraph breaks.
Speaker 1: I think we all agree that these are great. But
Speaker 1: surely there's somebody out there who's gotten a bit experimental
Speaker 1: and decided I will craft a work of fiction that
Speaker 1: has no paragraph breaks. And I didn't. I don't remember
Speaker 1: every encountering anything like this. I've certainly read books that
Speaker 1: for instance, don't have quotation marks for dialogue, or I
Speaker 1: think I've read books that don't have intentions on new paragraphs.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to remember what this would have been. I
Speaker 1: think it was an Anthony Burchase book, but I don't
Speaker 1: recall I've I've certainly read books where you have, you know,
Speaker 1: large sections written in fictional slang, it's et cetera. But
Speaker 1: I've never encountered anything that is one massive chunk of text.
Speaker 1: I looked around to see if such a thing existed,
Speaker 1: and I did find some threads on like a creative
Speaker 1: writing board message board where someone was like, Hey, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking of writing something with no paragraph breaks. What does
Speaker 1: everyone think? And uh, there were some great answers. You know,
Speaker 1: people were like, well, I think it's gonna be hard
Speaker 1: for folks to digest. I think it's gonna you know,
Speaker 1: they're gonna potentially recoil from seeing that big, massive block
Speaker 1: of text. And and so it was. It was interesting
Speaker 1: because yeah, there's so many things you can you can
Speaker 1: break and play with as a writer potentially, uh, and
Speaker 1: and more so if you know what you're doing. But
Speaker 1: but when it comes to the paragraph break, it does
Speaker 1: seem there is something from the modern standpoint anyway, that
Speaker 1: is essential about it. Yes, And I think this will
Speaker 1: make a great transition to talking a bit about the
Speaker 1: history of the paragraph, where paragraphs come from, because if
Speaker 1: you go back far enough in in history, you're going
Speaker 1: to find a lot of literature that is made entirely
Speaker 1: with that block of text mentality. Man, you hate big
Speaker 1: blocky masses of text. Look at like an ancient Greek
Speaker 1: men you script and just feel the chill. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: and I was, I was looking at some of these examples,
Speaker 1: and and so I couldn't help but think a lot
Speaker 1: about the medium involved too. So like if you go
Speaker 1: back and look at super old examples of writing that
Speaker 1: have survived, you're looking at things like oracle bones, which
Speaker 1: you know, often times you're dealing with with like say
Speaker 1: the bones from a turtle, part of the shell, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing with inscriptions on it, or you're dealing
Speaker 1: with with like wooden strips. You see that sometimes from
Speaker 1: from from from from from you know, Indian tradition. There's also,
Speaker 1: of course the use of clay tablets, and a lot
Speaker 1: of times you're you're you probably have to realize, okay,
Speaker 1: this is this was relatively expensive and consumed a lot
Speaker 1: of time and energy, So you would want to fit
Speaker 1: as much text on one of those as possible. And
Speaker 1: at the same time, there's only so much text you
Speaker 1: could get on there, you know, like how many thoughts
Speaker 1: could you effectively encode into an oracle bone? Um, even
Speaker 1: if you're in even if what you're putting down is
Speaker 1: certainly maybe not a diary entry, but it's more about
Speaker 1: just recording figures and facts and that sort of thing. Well,
Speaker 1: I do think a lot of the conventions of writing
Speaker 1: might be contingent on differences between a a document scarcity
Speaker 1: culture and a document rich culture, which I think we
Speaker 1: you know, it sort of came up when we were
Speaker 1: talking about the history of technologies for duplicating documents. Um
Speaker 1: that you know, people just have different ways of approaching
Speaker 1: writing when written documents or something that is expensive and
Speaker 1: scarce versus when they're just you know, cheap to make
Speaker 1: and all over the place. Yeah. So yeah, from our
Speaker 1: modern standpoint, I was I was trying to think of
Speaker 1: what is my relationship with paragraph breaks, and I tend
Speaker 1: to think of it as kind of like the breath
Speaker 1: of the text, you know, it's the fluctuating intensity of
Speaker 1: the the author's mental process. H. And I also feel that,
Speaker 1: you know, with a very visual mind, and and one
Speaker 1: hone for for fiction reading by film viewing to a
Speaker 1: large degree, I think, you know, like I was viewing
Speaker 1: films and viewing TV before I was reading, and and
Speaker 1: so to a certain extent, the paragraph breaks are also
Speaker 1: sort of like stage direction, like look at this, now,
Speaker 1: look at this, and they can help drive home shifts
Speaker 1: in tone, intensity and character and so forth. Um. So it's,
Speaker 1: you know, from our modern standpoint, the format is part
Speaker 1: of the signal. Strip the format away, and the signal
Speaker 1: is degraded, like that big block of text. If you
Speaker 1: take any given work, um, you know, you take up it. Certainly,
Speaker 1: if you take something like got any of the books
Speaker 1: that we've discussed so far, uh, and you take all
Speaker 1: the paragraph breaks out, it's not going to be the same,
Speaker 1: because it's like the breath patterns of the voice speaking
Speaker 1: to you are altered. Uh. But what if the text
Speaker 1: is written in such a way that the characters, the symbols,
Speaker 1: and the words alone are the signal. How do you
Speaker 1: denote shifts in subject matter? How do you do the
Speaker 1: things that paragraph breaks do? Uh. And and and also
Speaker 1: like where, where and how does that emerge out of
Speaker 1: our written language traditions? Yeah, and to imagine documents where
Speaker 1: the signal is really just the sequence of the characters,
Speaker 1: like the letters in the words. A great thing to
Speaker 1: look at is actual ancient Greek and Roman documents. Uh.
Speaker 1: These things used to often be written on papyrus scrolls,
Speaker 1: So remember these would not be books like ours with
Speaker 1: flippable pages. The format with flippable pages like we used
Speaker 1: today is called a codex. The scroll is the one
Speaker 1: continuous sheet, and text on the scrolls of papyrus was
Speaker 1: generally written until until more like in the medieval period
Speaker 1: in a method called scriptio continua. And this means there
Speaker 1: is no punctuation between sentences and there are no spaces
Speaker 1: between words. No spaces between words is up to you
Speaker 1: to figure out where one word stops in another one starts. Uh.
Speaker 1: They don't have punctuation between sentences, and they very likely
Speaker 1: don't have paragraph breaks, but there might be something in
Speaker 1: there to signal some kind of transition to help you out. Now,
Speaker 1: is this as as this was a written language of symbols,
Speaker 1: what did we do when we turn to symbols? To
Speaker 1: denote these shifts. I was initially reading about this in
Speaker 1: the Origin of the Pill Crow a k A the
Speaker 1: Strange paragraph symbol by Jimmy Stamp for Smithsonian in and
Speaker 1: Stamp rights that if we go back to around two CE,
Speaker 1: we'd find paragraphs quote unquote which could loosely be understood
Speaker 1: as changes in topics, speaker, or stanza that were separated
Speaker 1: by various symbols that scribes had developed independently out of
Speaker 1: the need for such breaks, but without any kind of
Speaker 1: top down consistency. So, uh, the you know, scribes here
Speaker 1: in this part of Europe might be using one thing.
Speaker 1: Over here they're using another thing, just different traditions. Uh,
Speaker 1: different symbols emerging Stamp rights quote. Some used unfamiliar symbols
Speaker 1: that can't easily be translated into a typed blog post.
Speaker 1: Some used something as simple as a single line, while
Speaker 1: other used the K for caput for the Latin word
Speaker 1: for head. Languages change spellings evolved, and by the twelfth
Speaker 1: century scribes abandoned the K in favor of the C
Speaker 1: for capitula little head to divide text into capitula, also
Speaker 1: known as chapters. Like the treble cleft, the pill crow
Speaker 1: evolved due to the inconsistencies inherent in hand drawing. As
Speaker 1: it became more widely used, the c gained a vertical
Speaker 1: line in keeping with the latest rubrication trends and other
Speaker 1: more elaborate embellishments, eventually becoming the character scene at the
Speaker 1: top of this post. And the character in question is
Speaker 1: the pill crow, which you can you can all look
Speaker 1: look this up if you're not envisioning it already. It's
Speaker 1: this curious, slightly ornate symbol that looks kind of like
Speaker 1: a backwards P with a with a stalk made out
Speaker 1: of two vertical lines, and the hollow of the P
Speaker 1: is often filled in, so that's solid. Does that Does
Speaker 1: that seem like a reasonable um description of this strange symbol. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's the thing that I remember first seeing when I
Speaker 1: was like trying to edit documents in an early version
Speaker 1: of Microsoft Word and I accidentally clicked some setting where
Speaker 1: suddenly every line break had one of these, and I
Speaker 1: was like, ah, how do I make them go away? Uh?
Speaker 1: But in fact, it used to be quite common for say,
Speaker 1: medieval manuscripts to be full of these symbols. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And indeed, indeed, I think most of modern readers are
Speaker 1: going to be familiar with this from doing the same thing,
Speaker 1: clicking on the wrong thing in the word processor and
Speaker 1: seeing all the pill crows, seeing all the little machine
Speaker 1: oils that are making paragraph breaks possible. Um. I think
Speaker 1: there are also some some modern legal and academic writing
Speaker 1: uses of the pill crow. But but it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's used in web publishing, it's used in proofreading. But
Speaker 1: it has this origin in just a way to break
Speaker 1: up thoughts. Yes, And so strangely enough, the word paragraph
Speaker 1: though now the word refers to a chunk of text itself.
Speaker 1: The word actually comes from the Greek originally paragraphos, which
Speaker 1: means written beside, you know, to right beside something. And
Speaker 1: that comes from the fact that originally paragraph breaks come
Speaker 1: from this practice of making some kind of mark in
Speaker 1: the margin of a document. So you'd have like a
Speaker 1: papyrus scroll, it's just got this big, unbroken chunk of
Speaker 1: letters just marching down the page. And the way you
Speaker 1: signal some kind of transition. And as you said, Rob,
Speaker 1: it wasn't consistent. It wasn't like there were, you know,
Speaker 1: stable rules for when you use the paragraph as and
Speaker 1: when you don't. It just means something is changing here.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's a change a new sentence begins on this line,
Speaker 1: or maybe it's that there's a change in speakers in
Speaker 1: a drama or a philosophical dialogue or something, or change
Speaker 1: of topic. It's just something is different here. And originally
Speaker 1: that's this line, just like a dash in the margin,
Speaker 1: and then over time it changes into these letters you're
Speaker 1: talking about, like the K or the C in in
Speaker 1: Latin manuscripts, and then eventually the C gets these bars
Speaker 1: and it becomes the pill crow. But I think this
Speaker 1: is all originally derived from this paragraph as marker. Just
Speaker 1: the dash in the margin says something's different now. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this this post I was looking at by Amp. He's
Speaker 1: citing Keith Houston's Shady Characters, The Secret the Secret Life
Speaker 1: of punctuation symbols and other typographical marks, and it gets
Speaker 1: into like basically the the death of the pill Crow.
Speaker 1: Where does the pill Crow go? And it's actually a
Speaker 1: pretty interesting story because basically what ends up happening in
Speaker 1: the medieval period is the ring used more and more,
Speaker 1: but then they start to sort of vanish in the
Speaker 1: late medieval period, and the main reason is that you
Speaker 1: have texts being copied, uh, you know, that was how
Speaker 1: you reproduce texts, as we've discussed in the show before.
Speaker 1: And you had these pill crows which had become increasingly
Speaker 1: artistic and ornamental in nature. And when you had things
Speaker 1: like that in a manuscript that was being copied, well,
Speaker 1: somebody else had to come back in and add those
Speaker 1: in later. You just had to leave a space for them. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's uh, that's the job that would fall to
Speaker 1: the rubricators. They'd be the ones that come back in
Speaker 1: and add the read ink or other special effects that
Speaker 1: need to be a part of this you know, illuminated
Speaker 1: manuscript that's being copied. That's that's actually where their name
Speaker 1: comes from. Rubric is from the Latin meaning red, So
Speaker 1: like the word rubric is derived from the idea of
Speaker 1: a heading in a document that might be written and
Speaker 1: read because of these these people, the rubricators, who are
Speaker 1: using red ink. Yeah, they It sounds kind of nefarious,
Speaker 1: doesn't it, the rubricators. Um, I wonder if anyone has
Speaker 1: has used that in a nefarious fashion and in some
Speaker 1: sort of strange fiction before the Red Letterman. But but anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you have all these these these blanks that have
Speaker 1: to be left when you're copying the manuscripts. And the
Speaker 1: thing is is the world piles up sometimes that the
Speaker 1: rubrication doesn't get done, those those spaces remain in the
Speaker 1: Finnish text. And then this carries on apparently when we
Speaker 1: get to the advent of the printing press as well.
Speaker 1: Early printed books were printed with spaces for hand drawn
Speaker 1: effects such as pill crows. So you know, you're you're
Speaker 1: using the adjustable typeface, you're using the you know, the
Speaker 1: block letters, and all your printing stuff out, but then
Speaker 1: somebody needs to come back in and add that pill crow,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they don't. Uh and and certainly this became
Speaker 1: the case as demand grew, rubricators couldn't keep up, and
Speaker 1: the pill crow dies out, but the spaces for the
Speaker 1: pill crow remain. It's almost like if you go into
Speaker 1: an old house and they still have the like the
Speaker 1: little nook for a rotary phone. Have you been in
Speaker 1: one of these show, Yeah, yeah, So it's like that
Speaker 1: that technology is obsolete now, but the space where it
Speaker 1: went it still remains. So what began as a kind
Speaker 1: of vaguely defined punctuation mark that would be in the
Speaker 1: margin beside a column of text, eventually becomes a more
Speaker 1: sort of inline punctuation mark, and then eventually just becomes
Speaker 1: a space in the line, a line break in an indentation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to add one more interesting thing about
Speaker 1: the the old school paragraph as mark in like a
Speaker 1: Greek in Latin manuscripts. This is from that article by
Speaker 1: Gibson that I mentioned earlier. So Gibson points out that
Speaker 1: scholars believe that in many or most cases, these marks
Speaker 1: in the documents cannot be traced back to the original author. Instead,
Speaker 1: they are usually something that would be added to a text,
Speaker 1: either by a reader or by a scribe or editor
Speaker 1: making a copy of a text. Because remember, in the
Speaker 1: ancient world there was no printing press. Books had to
Speaker 1: be copied by hand. And we can tell that the
Speaker 1: paragraphs marks were probably added at some point after the
Speaker 1: original author, because sometimes they appear in different places in
Speaker 1: different copies of the same document. And so I think
Speaker 1: it's interesting to think about paragraph breaks as being in
Speaker 1: a way descended from something that wasn't encoded as a
Speaker 1: part of the text at the author's discretion, but at
Speaker 1: say a copyists discretion or at the reader's discretion, they
Speaker 1: might make these marks themselves on their own copy of
Speaker 1: the document for their own reading convenience. Gibson also talks
Speaker 1: about how so for like the cultural descendants of Greek
Speaker 1: and Roman rhetoric and composition, the scriptio continuous system, the
Speaker 1: one where it's just this block of of marching letters
Speaker 1: that goes straight down the scroll in a column. Uh,
Speaker 1: that that came apart for several reasons in the medieval period.
Speaker 1: One thing that Gibson draws attention to is the switch
Speaker 1: from the scroll to the codex. Uh. You know, the
Speaker 1: codex again is like modern day books, but with back
Speaker 1: then they would have often been with pages made out
Speaker 1: of animal skins. And this change in medium brought about
Speaker 1: a number of different ways of thinking about a text
Speaker 1: and how it's presented to a reader. There's also Gibson
Speaker 1: refers to a switch to what paleographer Mby Parks calls
Speaker 1: a quote grammar of legibility around the eighth and ninth centuries.
Speaker 1: So it seems like you've got a lot of people
Speaker 1: with sort of middling literacy participating in the copying and
Speaker 1: reading of documents, like you know, monks and uh and
Speaker 1: people within the Carolingian Renaissance. Uh. Basically they were trying
Speaker 1: to come up with new ways of writing that would
Speaker 1: make texts easier to read, especially if your language and
Speaker 1: literacy skills are not top notch. And so there are
Speaker 1: a number of legibility innovations in writing. One example would
Speaker 1: be the introduction of lower case scripts. You have capital
Speaker 1: letters and lower case letters to help help organize the
Speaker 1: words you're looking at. And the other big one is
Speaker 1: spaces between words thank god uh. And in this period,
Speaker 1: Gibson writes that medieval scribes also continued the tradition of
Speaker 1: of and identifying transitions of one kind or another subsections
Speaker 1: within text with that paragraphs marker. And then it's in
Speaker 1: in this literary tradition that the paragraph of marker goes
Speaker 1: through all these um, you know, morphing into different letters
Speaker 1: and then eventually becomes the pill crow, which then eventually
Speaker 1: in the technological sphere of the printing press uh in
Speaker 1: some cases, and then in most cases just becomes blank space. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I found it interesting to thinking about this, like
Speaker 1: going from from from the initial you know, the initial
Speaker 1: transformation from from using these uh these hand copied text
Speaker 1: to using the printing press but still holding onto things
Speaker 1: like uh like hand drawn illustrations, hand drawn um pill
Speaker 1: crows and so forth. It made me think about what
Speaker 1: happens when we do when we shift to a new
Speaker 1: technology or a new medium. I think another example, this
Speaker 1: is one we've touched on the show before, is by
Speaker 1: going increasingly going to PDFs and in electronic texts. Essentially
Speaker 1: that's more in line with the scroll. There doesn't need
Speaker 1: to be page break page to page, and I think,
Speaker 1: you know, viewing wise, you don't have to have one
Speaker 1: if you don't want one. But I know, from my part,
Speaker 1: I want those those page breaks in there, like something
Speaker 1: feels weird organizationally weird, even on electronic text which I
Speaker 1: use all the time, especially for work. And but but
Speaker 1: I feel like there needs to I need to feel
Speaker 1: like I'm looking at a digital version of a physical
Speaker 1: page in a physical book rather than the sort of
Speaker 1: of of endless stream that it actually is. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: and sometimes you would have to wonder like is it
Speaker 1: actually arbitrary which elements of composition, which like structural elements
Speaker 1: of composition are preserved across different media, and which are
Speaker 1: not so uh when you read an e book, they
Speaker 1: almost always are going to keep the author's original paragraph breaks, right,
Speaker 1: It's not going to rearrange what's a paragraph or make
Speaker 1: shorter paragraphs or something, But the original page breaks are
Speaker 1: of no concern at all. In fact, probably even you know,
Speaker 1: the original printing of that book may have had different
Speaker 1: page breaks than whatever form the author composed it in,
Speaker 1: whether on a typewriter or handwritten or whatever. And so
Speaker 1: we've just decided that, well, the page needs to look
Speaker 1: the same in terms of where the paragraphs are broken,
Speaker 1: but not it does not need to look the same
Speaker 1: in terms of where the pages are broken. And I
Speaker 1: see no reason where why like it would have to
Speaker 1: be that way, you know, But even that, I have
Speaker 1: to admit, seems a little wrong at times, Like I
Speaker 1: don't know if this is everyone else's experience, but when
Speaker 1: I'm reading books on my kindle um, I'll skip to
Speaker 1: the next page, and sometimes I'll come back or you know,
Speaker 1: accidentally turn the page and I'll turn back, and I'll
Speaker 1: notice that now the page break occurs at a different
Speaker 1: spot in the text, And that feels really wrong to me,
Speaker 1: and I feel even though there's no I don't think
Speaker 1: there's any way you could have that uniform, especially when
Speaker 1: you have the luxury of being able to change the
Speaker 1: size of the fond on the screen and so forth.
Speaker 1: But it feels weird that I shouldn't have internal consistency
Speaker 1: regarding when a page ends and when it begins. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: I mean that I think we have expectations established on
Speaker 1: the basis of physical printed books where you know, that
Speaker 1: just doesn't change. Right. I'm not saying it messes me up,
Speaker 1: it really business me off or anything, but it's just
Speaker 1: something I casually notice as I'm reading. It's like, what
Speaker 1: now the page ends on this paragraph? Well, this also
Speaker 1: makes me think about something Gibson mentions in this essay,
Speaker 1: which is uh, he writes, quote, Medieval readers and writers
Speaker 1: were thus increasingly attentive to the visual appearance of the
Speaker 1: page and as a and as a result, recognize the
Speaker 1: paragraph significant place within it. So it's sort of in
Speaker 1: the medieval period that the paragraph becomes an important part
Speaker 1: of reading. Uh. And I was thinking about this. You know,
Speaker 1: I have a lay person's perspective on this, so I
Speaker 1: don't know if this is a good insight, but I
Speaker 1: was at least wondering. Okay, so you look at like
Speaker 1: medieval practices of producing highly decorated texts with you know,
Speaker 1: beautiful lettering and calligraphy, illustrations and illuminations and so forth.
Speaker 1: It seems to me you find a lot less of
Speaker 1: that in earlier texts. You like, if you look at
Speaker 1: copies of the same books from centuries earlier, for example
Speaker 1: the Bible. Uh, the earlier copies, there often seems to
Speaker 1: be no attempt whatsoever to improve the aesthetic qualities of
Speaker 1: the copy. It's more like the scroll is just a
Speaker 1: purely utilitarian storage medium for the text of the book. Uh,
Speaker 1: So that you know, wouldn't be otherwise lost or forgotten,
Speaker 1: and it would probably often be used for being read aloud.
Speaker 1: Then you again, take the same text and look at
Speaker 1: a medieval manuscript, it might be gorgeous in some way.
Speaker 1: So it seems possible that the modern concept of the
Speaker 1: paragraph emerges from a time of more literary luxury, when
Speaker 1: there's a greater emphasis on making manuscripts themselves aesthetically pleasing.
Speaker 1: All right, Rob and I were just talking off Mike
Speaker 1: and we decided we have to admit defeat by time
Speaker 1: where we we had more to talk about, we didn't
Speaker 1: get to it yet. So this is going to become
Speaker 1: a two part episode. Yeah, maybe it'll give any time
Speaker 1: to find that actual perfect paragraph from some book I love.
Speaker 1: I'll look around, maybe something will pop out at me.
Speaker 1: All right, we'll join us next time as we continue
Speaker 1: this discussion, but go ahead and right in. We'd love
Speaker 1: to hear from you if you have thoughts about the
Speaker 1: paragraph as we've discussed it thus far. Core episodes of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind published Tuesdays and Thursdays, and
Speaker 1: the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed We are
Speaker 1: primarily a science podcast, and those are the primarily science episodes.
Speaker 1: On Monday's we do a listener mail, on Wednesdays we
Speaker 1: do short form artifact or monster Fact, and on Friday's
Speaker 1: we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
Speaker 1: a weird film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent
Speaker 1: audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to
Speaker 1: get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
Speaker 1: or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
Speaker 1: or just to say hello, you can email us at
Speaker 1: contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
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