Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, we had a day
Speaker 2: off this week, so we are bringing you an episode
Speaker 2: from the vault, and this is part one of our
Speaker 2: series on the paragraph. Yes, the literary device, the chunk
Speaker 2: of text. What is the paragraph? Where does it come from?
Speaker 2: How does it work? This episode originally published on August
Speaker 2: twenty third, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: All right, let's jump right in.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert.
Speaker 2: Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And in today's episode, I
Speaker 2: wanted to take a look at a writing convention and
Speaker 2: that is the paragraph or the paragraph break. I think
Speaker 2: there was a single moment of genesis in my desire
Speaker 2: to do this episode, and it's that, you know, some
Speaker 2: number of weeks back, I was doing research for some
Speaker 2: episode and I ended up looking up an archived plain
Speaker 2: text version of an old book.
Speaker 1: Rob.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you've had this issue on the show before.
Speaker 2: So you get plain text and the text is there,
Speaker 2: but all the original parag breaks are messed up. Like
Speaker 2: they're either in the wrong place or there are no breaks,
Speaker 2: and I was like trying to read it. I was
Speaker 2: just like, this is horrible. I hate this. Even though
Speaker 2: the whole text is here, I'm basically incapable of reading it. Somehow,
Speaker 2: the existence of paragraphs with reasonable breaks is what makes
Speaker 2: a massive text physically consumable to.
Speaker 1: Me, right, and certainly, if it is supposed to be paragraphs,
Speaker 1: it's supposed to have paragraph breaks in it. It's like
Speaker 1: if someone were to bring a seven course meal to
Speaker 1: you and say, here, here it is in stew form,
Speaker 1: please enjoy it. I mean, and it hasn't been blended
Speaker 1: up in this scenario at all. So it's not like
Speaker 1: it is garbled. All of it is still there, but
Speaker 1: here it is without the little breaks. Here it is
Speaker 1: just all, you know, either either in the same pot
Speaker 1: or 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. There needs to be
Speaker 1: an order to what is occurring.
Speaker 2: Right, Why not just put the tira massou in the
Speaker 2: clam chowder and then you get it all at once. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And so this got me thinking about paragraphs in general,
Speaker 2: and wondering about where they come from historically, and why
Speaker 2: we build them the way that we do, if there
Speaker 2: even is a consistent way that we build them, and
Speaker 2: all kinds of questions like this, And one thing I
Speaker 2: thought might be interesting to get us kicked off today
Speaker 2: is to just talk about the literary effect, the effect
Speaker 2: on the reader when you're reading a book with a
Speaker 2: lot of long paragraph versus short paragraphs, Like how does
Speaker 2: that change the experience of reading and the impression created.
Speaker 2: I'm sure other people have different ways of answering this,
Speaker 2: but one immediate distinction I thought of in my own
Speaker 2: reading experience has to do with the feeling of substance
Speaker 2: versus the feeling of momentum, and I would explain it
Speaker 2: like this. When I think about good books with very
Speaker 2: short paragraphs, I tend to think about readability and hookiness.
Speaker 2: Like Airport thriller novels. They tend to have very short paragraphs,
Speaker 2: and those short paragraphs are I think effective for what
Speaker 2: they're meant to do. That they tend to make the
Speaker 2: text easy to read. They make it feel like it's
Speaker 2: fast moving and inviting. It wants to keep you reading,
Speaker 2: making you less likely to put the book down. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: when I think about good books with very long paragraphs,
Speaker 2: I tend to think about literary richness, like obsessive observation
Speaker 2: or description or insight texts that feel like they are
Speaker 2: packed with detail and texture and thoughtfulness. So, in trying
Speaker 2: to like balance out those two different advantages you get
Speaker 2: from different paragraph lengths, I came up with a kind
Speaker 2: of perhaps silly metaphor, but I started thinking about trips
Speaker 2: to bring groceries in from the car. You know, you
Speaker 2: ever go out shopping, you have a bunch of different things,
Speaker 2: and you can, you know, you can take one or
Speaker 2: two bags each time, or you can try to do
Speaker 2: everything in one go, but sometimes that's impossible and you
Speaker 2: have to stop halfway to the door. So like when
Speaker 2: your paragraphs are too short, it's almost like you're trying
Speaker 2: to bring the groceries in one item at a time.
Speaker 2: Something just starts to feel kind of insubstantial and absurd
Speaker 2: about what you're doing. But if paragraphs are too long,
Speaker 2: that's kind of like trying to bring everything in in
Speaker 2: one trip, and you just stop, like you have to
Speaker 2: put it down and decide, okay, I can't do this,
Speaker 2: So you're kind of balancing mobility, the mobility of carrying
Speaker 2: less with the substance of carrying more.
Speaker 1: I think that's a good that's an interesting life thinking
Speaker 1: about it that certainly, because the other side of that
Speaker 1: is I'm instantly thinking of the person that is obscenely
Speaker 1: trying to carry all the groceries in in one go,
Speaker 1: like you know, and I think I've tried to do
Speaker 1: this before, where you're just you have multiple grocery bag
Speaker 1: straps on each hand, you have something on your arm,
Speaker 1: a sort of 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 want to be like calmed down a little bit,
Speaker 1: like I bought the book, or I rented the book,
Speaker 1: or I borrowed the book from the library, whatever the
Speaker 1: case may be. We can get to all this. We
Speaker 1: don't have to have it all in the first paragraph.
Speaker 2: Right, And this is not I think this is not
Speaker 2: unique to modern readers. I mean, people who are writing
Speaker 2: handbooks of composition and rhetoric in centuries past warned that
Speaker 2: overly long paragraphs have the effect of quote over taxing
Speaker 2: the reader. There's something about unbroken blocks of text that
Speaker 2: just gets tiresome. And somehow, even though the text continues
Speaker 2: either way, just putting more breaks in between, separating that
Speaker 2: in the smaller chunks, smaller paragraphs somehow makes the text
Speaker 2: feel lighter and like you're just sort of like skipping
Speaker 2: over it at at a breezy pace, as opposed to
Speaker 2: 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 a nineteen sixty eight paper titled
Speaker 1: writing Paragraphs by Culkin at All and 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.
Speaker 1: I didn't get to the bottom of how these individuals
Speaker 1: all came together being credited on the same paper, but
Speaker 1: it gets into some of the basics and challenges and
Speaker 1: goals of teaching effective writing. But even in this paper,
Speaker 1: the authors point out that the unity of a given
Speaker 1: paragraph is often illusory, a longer paragraph, they point out,
Speaker 1: can often be broken into without upsetting anything. And they
Speaker 1: point out, for instance, this is often done at certainly
Speaker 1: at the editing phase and newspapers. The author wrote a
Speaker 1: paragraph it's a little bit too long looking on the screen,
Speaker 1: you just chop that sucker in half, and a lot
Speaker 1: of times you can do that without any ill effect.
Speaker 1: And likewise they point out that the reverse is true.
Speaker 1: In many cases. You can take shorter paragraphs and kind
Speaker 1: of combine them together and you're not going to effectively
Speaker 1: break anything. So that's I think that's something interesting to
Speaker 1: keep in mind, even though at the same time they
Speaker 1: are acknowledging that, yeah, a lot of paragraph writing is
Speaker 1: about Okay, here's your this is the stuff we all
Speaker 1: learn in school, right here is our topic sentence. Then
Speaker 1: we have supporting sentences, and the paragraph is supposed to
Speaker 1: be this one concise nugget of thought for us to consume.
Speaker 2: Well, that's a great transition to the next thing I
Speaker 2: wanted to get at, which is that you know, of
Speaker 2: course we're talking about reporting our subjective feelings as a
Speaker 2: reader on you know, reading paragraphs of different lengths. But
Speaker 2: the other side of the approach to paragraphs is the
Speaker 2: more prescriptive approach. You know, here's what a paragraph must do,
Speaker 2: with the most famous or if you like, infamous prescription
Speaker 2: being that a paragraph must develop a single idea, and
Speaker 2: that idea must be announced near the beginning of the
Speaker 2: paragraph in a topic sentence, and then there must be
Speaker 2: supporting sentences. And you know, we can talk more about
Speaker 2: the prescriptive idea of the paragraph later, I guess. But anyway,
Speaker 2: I find it interesting to consider the surface level paradox
Speaker 2: that paragraphs are absolutely essential to most modern readers. I
Speaker 2: think you and I are probably not unique in this.
Speaker 2: Like the prospect of reading a book or even a
Speaker 2: long article that's just a single, unbroken block of text
Speaker 2: makes my blood run cold. I could not do it.
Speaker 2: And yet it is difficult to explain exactly what the
Speaker 2: rule rules are for creating paragraphs like they're essential. But
Speaker 2: attempts to codify them in a universal way, I would argue,
Speaker 2: and I think we will argue later on pretty much
Speaker 2: universally failures, at at least at describing the way paragraphs
Speaker 2: are actually used in popular writing. You know, so, questions
Speaker 2: about where do we break the line and why are
Speaker 2: in some ways still kind of elusive, even though breaking
Speaker 2: the line is a must.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, I don't know how successful this will be, but
Speaker 2: I did at least think, is it possible to mention
Speaker 2: favorite paragraph breaks in writing? I was struggling to have
Speaker 2: any like obviously I have a lot of bits of
Speaker 2: writing that are a paragraph, but I was struggling to
Speaker 2: think of examples where the break of the paragraph is
Speaker 2: what I admire in the writing, as essential as it
Speaker 2: is to a piece of writing as a whole.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was once you brought this up. I was
Speaker 1: thinking on it on my own here, and I was thinking, well, okay,
Speaker 1: what are bits that stand out to me in writing?
Speaker 1: And I found that a lot of times the things
Speaker 1: that come to me the easiest are opening lines or
Speaker 1: sometimes closing lines from novels, and a lot of those
Speaker 1: a lot of the time, if not all the time.
Speaker 1: It's super short. It's often not even perhaps a true
Speaker 1: clinical paragraph in that it is actually just one line.
Speaker 1: And like a couple of examples that I instantly thought of,
Speaker 1: Dante's Inferno has a great one in the of course
Speaker 1: we're getting into poetry here, we're getting into stanzas, but
Speaker 1: it is effectively a sentence in the middle of the
Speaker 1: journey of our life. I came to myself in a
Speaker 1: dark wood for the straightway was lost. An even better example,
Speaker 1: and this is from an actual novel. This is from
Speaker 1: Alan Rogue Grills The Voyeur. It just begins with a
Speaker 1: short sentence it was as if no one had heard.
Speaker 1: And I always loved that one because it's so evocative,
Speaker 1: like what is the thing that no one had heard?
Speaker 1: Why had they not heard it? And who is making
Speaker 1: or what is making the sound? Like it asked so
Speaker 1: many questions that I have to keep moving. Another good
Speaker 1: one Fahrenheit four fifty one by Ray Bradberry. It was
Speaker 1: a pleasure to burn.
Speaker 2: Oh that's interesting. So these prose works. I've read these,
Speaker 2: but I did not recall the opening paragraphs being a
Speaker 2: single line.
Speaker 1: Yeah. A couple of other ones that came to mind.
Speaker 1: Neurom Anser by William Gibson. The sky above the port
Speaker 1: was the color of television turned to a dead channel
Speaker 1: or this is a famous one as well. From Fear
Speaker 1: and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. We
Speaker 1: were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert
Speaker 1: when the drugs began to take hold, Yeah, that's another
Speaker 1: good one.
Speaker 2: So you're a fan of the short, possibly single sentence
Speaker 2: opening paragraph in fiction at least.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, there's something about just like that one line
Speaker 1: that's really there. Really either either it really makes me
Speaker 1: think and established as kind of a vibe, or in
Speaker 1: some cases it establishes a different definite setting or scenario
Speaker 1: rather succinctly. For instance, the Gibson one a certain it's
Speaker 1: really more about vibe. The Voyeur quote is more about vibe.
Speaker 1: The Hunter S. Thompson one is vibe and setting. It
Speaker 1: gives you a sense of where we're going and sort
Speaker 1: of what is going on. I was obviously I'm a
Speaker 1: big fan of Dune, so I thought, well, what was
Speaker 1: the first line of doing I can't remember it off
Speaker 1: the top of my head. There, if you skip past
Speaker 1: the quote from the Princess, the first line is in
Speaker 1: the week before their departure to Aracus, when all the
Speaker 1: final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an
Speaker 1: old crone came to visit the mother of the boy Paul.
Speaker 1: Now that's that's not a paragraph that I would just say,
Speaker 1: oh I put that on a T shirt for me,
Speaker 1: or or can I have that inscribed in my flesh.
Speaker 1: But it is a great, a great opening line that
Speaker 1: just establishes exactly what is going on and gives you,
Speaker 1: you know, it gives you some mystery. I guess you
Speaker 1: don't know what Aracus is at this point, and you
Speaker 1: were instantly wondering, well, who is this old crone? And
Speaker 1: it sets the story and it does a good job
Speaker 1: of just just having us dived directly into the action. Really,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't remember or just looking around really quickly
Speaker 1: find an example of a multi sentence paragraph, particularly an
Speaker 1: opening paragraph from a work that I held to a
Speaker 1: really high standard. I don't know how about you, Joe.
Speaker 2: I'm sure if I had more time thinking about this,
Speaker 2: I could come up with good examples, but I have not,
Speaker 2: because again, I think paragraph breaks are essential, but I
Speaker 2: have not scrutinized individual breaks enough that they really like
Speaker 2: stick with me, there's something that is essential, but they
Speaker 2: mostly to me, become invisible in a text. I don't
Speaker 2: remember where the line breaks happen.
Speaker 1: Usually, Yeah, if a paragraph is put together effectively and
Speaker 1: it's doing its job, you don't notice. That's one of
Speaker 1: the things about it. I've never had the experience of
Speaker 1: reading something to think, yeah, that's a great place for
Speaker 1: a paragraph break, I might think the other the opposite
Speaker 1: of that, I might think, couldn't we have broken this
Speaker 1: up a little bit more Frank Herbert or whoever I'm
Speaker 1: happening to read, And it's not necessarily I was thinking
Speaker 1: about this as well, like, what is the experience of
Speaker 1: reading a text that is not just one big breakless
Speaker 1: paragraph but has, but does have some rather expansive paragraphs.
Speaker 1: I find that sometimes when I'm looking at this page,
Speaker 1: I still have a gut instinct that it looks like work,
Speaker 1: Like you know what I'm saying, Like, even though the
Speaker 1: thing is, if it's a book that I'm even halfway
Speaker 1: interested in, it's not like big paragraphs are a stumbling
Speaker 1: block to me. It's not like I get lost in
Speaker 1: them or I'm not going to finish them. It's not
Speaker 1: like I need to, you know, artificially throw in paragraph breaks.
Speaker 1: From my own reading, it works just fine. But there's
Speaker 1: something maybe it's like a callback to early reading experiences,
Speaker 1: but there's sort of that initial impact in my psyche
Speaker 1: where it's like, oh, these paragraphs are too long, what
Speaker 1: is this author doing? Oh?
Speaker 2: This is funny though, because inserting your own paragraph breaks
Speaker 2: in the work of an author who otherwise creates really
Speaker 2: unholy chunks. This is something that some teachers actually do,
Speaker 2: and one specific writer I was reading for this episode
Speaker 2: talks about doing so. One of the main things I
Speaker 2: was reading in preparation for this was a great essay
Speaker 2: by a scholar named Richard Hughes Gibson called Past Lives
Speaker 2: of the Paragraph which was published in the Hedgehog Review.
Speaker 2: That's an interdisciplinary culture journal based out of the University
Speaker 2: of Virginia. And I'll refer back to this article several
Speaker 2: times in the episode, but towards the end of his article,
Speaker 2: Gibson tells a story about how several years back he
Speaker 2: was trying to prepare a reading for students, and this
Speaker 2: was by a critic who, well, i'll just hear read
Speaker 2: from what Gibson writes. Quote said critic had a pensioned
Speaker 2: for composing labyrinthine paragraphs, which I now realized would quickly
Speaker 2: exhaust my students. Although I felt a tinge of compunction
Speaker 2: about tampering with those paragraphs, I set to work and,
Speaker 2: knowing this was the only way of salvaging the reading,
Speaker 2: the breaks came easily, though, and I soon found the
Speaker 2: work enjoyable. I was seeing the piece in a new way,
Speaker 2: and I quote discovered several remarkable sentences that I had
Speaker 2: overlooked while navigating my way through the labyrinths. And then
Speaker 2: he also says that this did indeed make this article
Speaker 2: much more enjoyable for the students, and he just started
Speaker 2: doing it in all his other classes. When somebody has
Speaker 2: huge paragraphs, he would just go in and edit them
Speaker 2: to add in paragraph breaks, and you could see. I
Speaker 2: don't know, an author might be mad to find out
Speaker 2: somebody was doing that to their work, but you can
Speaker 2: also clearly see the advantage.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, It does make me wonder if there are
Speaker 1: new editions of books that come out that engage in this,
Speaker 1: or is it considered forbidden? You know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'd be very curious to hear about this. When I
Speaker 1: was looking around for some other info about this, I
Speaker 1: did run across a paper titled how to write a
Speaker 1: thesis according to to Echo by unburd to Echo, And
Speaker 1: in it, he briefly touches on the paragraph and he
Speaker 1: writes the following quote begin new paragraphs. Often do so
Speaker 1: when logically necessary and when the pace of the text
Speaker 1: requires it. But the more you do it, the better.
Speaker 2: That's funny because Echo has a tendency to write some
Speaker 2: really long paragraphs. But I mean, in his defense, a
Speaker 2: lot of his long paragraphs are full of exactly that
Speaker 2: quality of richness that I was mentioning earlier, Like the
Speaker 2: long paragraphs feel substantial, They're full of detail and insight.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This, of course, I was thinking about other authors
Speaker 1: that I've really loved over the years, and I started
Speaker 1: thinking about Cormick McCarthy, of course, who is often very succinct,
Speaker 1: especially in his later works, or really most of his
Speaker 1: works passed like the first novel its name leaves me
Speaker 1: at the moment, but his first novel is a little
Speaker 1: bit denser. But a lot of his later work, especially
Speaker 1: his more recent work, is often characterized by being just,
Speaker 1: you know, very succinct, short sentences, no quotation marks. But
Speaker 1: occasionally you get a nice, like super run on long
Speaker 1: sentence that is essentially like a big paragraph that is
Speaker 1: almost the opposite of what we're talking about here, where
Speaker 1: it just keeps going and going, but at the same
Speaker 1: time it has a rhythm to it and an intensity,
Speaker 1: and the mere fact that it won't end. Is like
Speaker 1: it's like a crazed thought being poured directly into your
Speaker 1: brain and you can't quite turn it off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, long paragraphs can definitely lend themselves to a kind
Speaker 2: of obsessive, immersive or stream of consciousness quality to the text.
Speaker 2: It's you know, when you are like stuck deep in
Speaker 2: somebody else's brain and you're not coming up for air,
Speaker 2: that that's often going to be a long paragraph.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's almost like there's a conversational
Speaker 1: aspect to paragraph breaks, like this is the amount of
Speaker 1: text that is occurring before the speaker pauses, has a
Speaker 1: sip of their beverage, gives you an opportunity to think
Speaker 1: or say something in return. But it's just that paragraph.
Speaker 1: Then perhaps you're being preached at I was thinking of.
Speaker 1: I also was thinking, Okay, obviously, paragraph breaks. I think
Speaker 1: we all agree that these are great. But surely there's
Speaker 1: somebody out there who's gotten a bit experimental and decided
Speaker 1: I will craft a work of fiction that has no
Speaker 1: paragraph breaks. And I don't remember ever encountering anything like this.
Speaker 1: I've certainly read books that, for instance, don't have quotation
Speaker 1: marks for dialogue or I think I've read books that
Speaker 1: don't have indentions on new paragraphs. I'm trying to remember
Speaker 1: what this would have been. I think it was an
Speaker 1: Anthony Burgess book, but I don't recall. I've certainly read
Speaker 1: books where you have, you know, large sections written in
Speaker 1: fictional slang, etc. But I've never encountered anything that is
Speaker 1: one massive chunk of text. I looked around to see
Speaker 1: if such a thing existed, and I did find some
Speaker 1: threads on like a creative writing board message board where
Speaker 1: someone was like, Hey, I'm thinking of writing something with
Speaker 1: no paragraph breaks. What does everyone think? And there were
Speaker 1: some great answers, you know, people were like, well, I
Speaker 1: think it's gonna be hard for folks to digest. I
Speaker 1: think it's gonna you know, they're gonna potentially recoil from
Speaker 1: seeing that big, massive block of text. And so it
Speaker 1: was interesting because, yeah, there's so many things you can
Speaker 1: you can break and play with as a writer potentially,
Speaker 1: and more so if you know what you're doing. But
Speaker 1: when it comes to the paragraph break, it does seem
Speaker 1: like there is something from the modern standpoint anyway, that
Speaker 1: is essential about it.
Speaker 2: Yes, and I think this will make a great transition
Speaker 2: to talking a bit about the history of the paragraph,
Speaker 2: where paragraphs come from, because if you go back far
Speaker 2: enough in history, you're going to find a lot of
Speaker 2: literature that is made entirely with that block of text mentality. Man,
Speaker 2: you hate big, blocky masses of text. Look at like
Speaker 2: an ancient Greek manuscript and just feel the chill.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's and I was. I was looking at some
Speaker 1: of these examples, and and so I couldn't help but
Speaker 1: think a lot about the medium involved too. So, like
Speaker 1: if you go back and look at super old examples
Speaker 1: of writing that have survived, you're looking at things like
Speaker 1: oracle bones, which you know, oftentimes you're dealing with with
Speaker 1: like say the bones from a turtle, part of the shell,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing with inscriptions on it, or you're
Speaker 1: dealing with with like wooden strips. You see that sometimes
Speaker 1: from from from from from from you know, Indian traditions.
Speaker 1: There's also, of course, the use of clay tablets, and
Speaker 1: a lot of times you're you you probably have to realize, okay,
Speaker 1: this is this was relatively expensive and it consumed a
Speaker 1: lot of time and energy. So you would want to
Speaker 1: fit as much text on one of those as possible,
Speaker 1: and at the same time, there's only so much text
Speaker 1: you could get on there, you know, like how many
Speaker 1: thoughts could you effectively encode into an oracle bone? And
Speaker 1: even if you're in even of what you're putting down
Speaker 1: is certainly maybe not a diary entry, but it's more
Speaker 1: about just recording figures and facts and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: Well, I do think a lot of the conventions of
Speaker 2: writing might be contingent on the differences between a document
Speaker 2: scarcity culture and a document rich culture, which I think
Speaker 2: we you know, sort of came up when we were
Speaker 2: talking about the history of technologies for duplicating documents. That
Speaker 2: you know, people just have different ways of approaching writing
Speaker 2: when written documents are something that is expensive and scarce
Speaker 2: versus when they're just you know, cheap to make and
Speaker 2: all over the place.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So yeah, from our modern standpoint, I was trying
Speaker 1: to think of what is my relationship with paragraph breaks,
Speaker 1: and I tend to think of it as kind of
Speaker 1: like the breath of the text. You know, it's the
Speaker 1: fluctuating intensity of the author's mental process. And I also
Speaker 1: feel that, you know, with a very visual mind and
Speaker 1: one hone 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 so
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, the paragraph breaks are also sort
Speaker 1: of like stage direction, like look at this, now, look
Speaker 1: at this, and they can help drive home shifts in tone,
Speaker 1: intensity and character and so forth. So it's, you know,
Speaker 1: from our modern standpoint, the format is part of the signal.
Speaker 1: Strip the format away, and the signal is degraded, like
Speaker 1: that big block of text. If you take any given work,
Speaker 1: you know, you take up it. Certainly, if you take
Speaker 1: something like any of the books that we've discussed so far,
Speaker 1: and you take all the paragraph breaks out, it's not
Speaker 1: going to be the same because it's like the breath
Speaker 1: patterns of the voice speaking to you are altered. But
Speaker 1: what if the text is written in such a way
Speaker 1: that the characters, the symbols, and the words alone are
Speaker 1: the signal. How do you denote shifts in subject matter?
Speaker 1: How do you do the things that paragraph breaks do?
Speaker 1: And also like where and how does that emerge out
Speaker 1: of our written language traditions?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and to imagine documents where the signal is really
Speaker 2: just the sequence of the characters, like the letters in
Speaker 2: the words A great thing to look at is actual
Speaker 2: ancient Greek and Roman documents. These things used to often
Speaker 2: be written on papyrus scrolls, so remember these would not
Speaker 2: be books like ours with flippable pages. The format with
Speaker 2: flippable pages like we used today is called a codex.
Speaker 2: The scroll is the one continuous sheet, and text on
Speaker 2: these scrolls of papyrus was generally written until more like
Speaker 2: in the medieval period in a method called scriptio continua,
Speaker 2: and this means there is no punctuation between sentences and
Speaker 2: there are no spaces between words. No spaces between words.
Speaker 2: Is up to you to figure out where one word
Speaker 2: stops and another one starts. They don't have punctuation between sentences,
Speaker 2: they very likely don't have paragraph breaks, but there might
Speaker 2: be something in there to signal some kind of transition
Speaker 2: to help you out.
Speaker 1: No, as this was a written language of symbols, what
Speaker 1: did we do when we turned to symbols to denote
Speaker 1: these shifts? I was initially reading about this in the
Speaker 1: Origin of the Pilcrow aka the Strange Paragraph Symbol by
Speaker 1: Jimmy Stamp for Smithsonian in twenty thirteen, and Stamp writes
Speaker 1: that if we go back to around two hundred 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 the scribes here in this part
Speaker 1: of Europe might be using one thing. Over here they're
Speaker 1: using another thing, just different traditions, different symbols emerging Amprit's quote.
Speaker 1: Some used unfamiliar symbols that can't easily be translated into
Speaker 1: a typed blog post. Some used something as simple as
Speaker 1: a single line, while others used the K for caput
Speaker 1: for the Latin word for head. Languages change spellings evolve,
Speaker 1: and by the twelfth century scribes abandon the K in
Speaker 1: favor of the sea for capitulum little head to divide
Speaker 1: text into capitula, also known as chapters. Like the treble clef,
Speaker 1: the pill crow evolved due to the inconsistencies inherent in
Speaker 1: hand drawing. As it became more widely used, the sea
Speaker 1: gained a vertical line in keeping with the latest rubrication
Speaker 1: trends and other more elaborate embellishments. Eventually becoming the character
Speaker 1: scene at the top of this post. And the character
Speaker 1: in question is the pill crow, which you can all
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 stalk made out of two
Speaker 1: vertical lines, and the hollow of the P is often
Speaker 1: filled in so that it's solid. Does that Does that
Speaker 1: seem like a reasonable description of this strange symbol.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the thing that I remember first seeing when
Speaker 2: I was like trying to edit documents in an early
Speaker 2: version of Microsoft word and I accidentally clicked some setting
Speaker 2: where suddenly every line break had one of these, and
Speaker 2: I was like, ah, how do I make them go away? Uh?
Speaker 2: But in fact, it used to be quite common for say,
Speaker 2: medieval manuscripts to be full of these symbols.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And indeed, indeed, I think most of the
Speaker 1: modern readers are going to be familiar with this from
Speaker 1: doing the same thing, clicking on the wrong thing in
Speaker 1: a word processor and seeing all the pill crows, seeing
Speaker 1: all the little machine ls that are making paragraph breaks possible.
Speaker 1: I think there are also some some modern legal and
Speaker 1: academic writing uses of the pill crow, 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 and just a way to break
Speaker 1: up thoughts.
Speaker 2: Yes, And so strangely enough, the word paragraph though now
Speaker 2: the word refers to a chunk of text itself. The
Speaker 2: word actually comes from the Greek originally paragraphos, which means
Speaker 2: written beside, you know, to write beside something. And that
Speaker 2: comes from the fact that originally paragraph breaks come from
Speaker 2: this practice of making some kind of mark in the
Speaker 2: margin of a document, so you'd have like a Pyraates scroll,
Speaker 2: it's just got this big, unbroken chunk of letters just
Speaker 2: marching down the page. And the way you signal some
Speaker 2: kind of transition. And as you said, Robert, it wasn't consistent.
Speaker 2: It wasn't like there were, you know, stable rules for
Speaker 2: when you use the paragraphos and when you don't, it
Speaker 2: just means something is changing here. Maybe it's a change
Speaker 2: a new sentence begins on this line, or maybe it's
Speaker 2: that there's a change in speeders in a drama or
Speaker 2: a philosophical dialogue or something, or change of topic. It's
Speaker 2: just something is different here. And originally that's this line,
Speaker 2: just like a dash in the margin, and then over
Speaker 2: time it changes into these letters you're talking about, like
Speaker 2: the K or the C in Latin manuscripts, and then
Speaker 2: eventually the C gets these bars and it becomes the
Speaker 2: pill crow. But I think this is all originally derived
Speaker 2: from this paragraphs marker, just the dash in the margin.
Speaker 2: It says something's different now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this this post I was looking at by Stamp.
Speaker 1: He's citing Keith Houston's Shady Characters, The Secret Life of
Speaker 1: punctuation symbols and other typographical marks. And it gets into
Speaker 1: like the basically the death of the pill Crow. Where
Speaker 1: does the pill crow go? And it's actually a pretty
Speaker 1: interesting story because basically what ends up happening in the
Speaker 1: medieval period is they ring used more and more, but
Speaker 1: then they start to sort of vanish in the late
Speaker 1: medieval period. And the main reason is that you have
Speaker 1: texts being copied. That was how you reproduced texts, as
Speaker 1: we've discussed in the show before, and you had these
Speaker 1: pill crows which had become increasingly artistic and ornamental in nature.
Speaker 1: And when you had things like that in a manuscript
Speaker 1: that was being copied, well, somebody else had to come
Speaker 1: back in and add those in later. You just had
Speaker 1: to leave a space for them. And that's the job
Speaker 1: that would fall to the rubricators. They'd be the ones
Speaker 1: that come back in and add the read ink or
Speaker 1: other special effects that need to be a part of
Speaker 1: this illuminated manuscript that's being copied.
Speaker 2: That's actually where their name comes from. Rubric is from
Speaker 2: the Latin meaning red, So like the word rubric is
Speaker 2: derived from the idea of a heading in a document
Speaker 2: that might be written in red. Because of these people,
Speaker 2: the rubricators who were using red ink.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they fod It sounds kind of nefarious, doesn't it,
Speaker 1: the rubricators. I wonder if anyone has used that in
Speaker 1: a nefarious fashion and in some sort of strange fiction
Speaker 1: before the red letter men. But anyway, Yeah, so you
Speaker 1: have all these these these blanks that have to be
Speaker 1: left when you're copying manuscripts, and the thing is, as
Speaker 1: the work piles up sometimes that the rubrication doesn't get done,
Speaker 1: those those spaces remain in the finished text. And then
Speaker 1: this carries on apparently when we get to the advent
Speaker 1: of the printing press as well. Early printed books were
Speaker 1: printed with spaces for hand drawn effects. Such as pill crows.
Speaker 1: So you know, you're using the adjustable type face, you're
Speaker 1: using the you know, the block letters and all, you're
Speaker 1: printing stuff out, but then somebody needs to come back
Speaker 1: in and add that pill crow, and sometimes they don't,
Speaker 1: And certainly this became the case as demand grew, rubricators
Speaker 1: couldn't keep up, and the pill crow dies out, but
Speaker 1: the spaces for the pil crow remain. It's almost like
Speaker 1: if you go into an old house and they still
Speaker 1: have the like the little book for a rotary phone.
Speaker 1: Have you been in one of these shows?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So it's like that technology is obsolete now, but
Speaker 1: the space where it went it still remains.
Speaker 2: So what began as a kind of vaguely defined punctuation
Speaker 2: mark that would be in the margin beside a column
Speaker 2: of text eventually becomes a more sort of inline punctuation mark,
Speaker 2: and then eventually just becomes a space in the line,
Speaker 2: a line break, and an indentation.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to add one more interesting thing about
Speaker 2: the old school paragraphs mark in like a Greek in
Speaker 2: Latin manuscripts. This is from that article by Gibson that
Speaker 2: I mentioned earlier. So Gibson points out that scholars believe
Speaker 2: that in many or most cases, these marks in the
Speaker 2: documents cannot be traced back to the original author. Instead,
Speaker 2: they are usually something that would be added to a text,
Speaker 2: either by a reader or by a scribe or editor
Speaker 2: making a copy of a text. Because remember, in the
Speaker 2: ancient world there was no printing press. Books had to
Speaker 2: be copied by hand. And we can tell that the
Speaker 2: paragraphoss marks were probably added at some point after the
Speaker 2: original author, because sometimes they appear in different places in
Speaker 2: different copies of the same document. And so I think
Speaker 2: it's interesting to think about paragraph breaks as being in
Speaker 2: a way descended from something that wasn't encoded as a
Speaker 2: part of the text at the author's discretion, but at
Speaker 2: say a copyist's discretion or at the reader's discretion, they
Speaker 2: might make these marks themselves on their own copy of
Speaker 2: the document for their own reading convenience. Gibson also talks
Speaker 2: about how so for like the cultural descendants of Greek
Speaker 2: and Roman rhetoric and composition, the scriptio continuous system, the
Speaker 2: one where it's just this block of marching letters that
Speaker 2: goes straight down the scroll in a column that came
Speaker 2: apart for several reasons. In the medieval period, one thing
Speaker 2: that Gibson draws attention to is the switch from the
Speaker 2: scroll to the codex. You know, the codex again is
Speaker 2: like modern day books, but back then they would have
Speaker 2: often been with pages made out of animal skins, and
Speaker 2: this change in medium brought about a number of different
Speaker 2: ways of thinking about a text and how it's presented
Speaker 2: to a reader. There's also Gibson refers to a switch
Speaker 2: to what palaeographer MB. Parks calls a quote grammar of
Speaker 2: legibility around the eighth and ninth centuries. So it seems
Speaker 2: like you got a lot of people with sort of
Speaker 2: middling literacy participating in the copying and reading of documents,
Speaker 2: like you know, monks and people within the Carol Engine Renaissance. Basically,
Speaker 2: they were trying to come up with new ways of
Speaker 2: writing that would make texts easier to read, especially if
Speaker 2: your language and literacy skill are not top notch, and
Speaker 2: so there were a number of legibility innovations in writing.
Speaker 2: One example would be the introduction of lower case script,
Speaker 2: so you have capital letters in lower case letters to
Speaker 2: help organize the words you're looking at. And the other
Speaker 2: big one is spaces between words. Thank God. And in
Speaker 2: this period, Gibson writes that medieval scribes also continued the
Speaker 2: tradition of identifying transitions of one kind or another subsections
Speaker 2: within text with that paragraphs marker. And then it's in
Speaker 2: this literary tradition that the paragraphs marker goes through all
Speaker 2: these you know, morphing into different letters and then eventually
Speaker 2: becomes the pilcrow, which then eventually in the technological sphere
Speaker 2: of the printing press in some cases and then in
Speaker 2: most cases just becomes blank space.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I found it interesting too thinking about this,
Speaker 1: like going from from the initial you know, the initial
Speaker 1: transformation from from using these hand copyed text to using
Speaker 1: the printing press, but still holding on to things like
Speaker 1: like hand drawn illustrations, hand drawn pil crows, and so forth.
Speaker 1: It made me think about what happens when we do
Speaker 1: when we shift to a new technology or a new medium.
Speaker 1: I think another example, this is what we've touched on
Speaker 1: the show before, is by going increasingly going to PDFs
Speaker 1: and an electronic texts essentially that's more in line with
Speaker 1: the scroll. There doesn't need to be a page break
Speaker 1: page to page, and I think, you know, viewing wise,
Speaker 1: you don't have to have one if you don't want one.
Speaker 1: But I know, for my part, I want those those
Speaker 1: page breaks in there, like something feels weird organizationally weird,
Speaker 1: even on electronic texts, which I use all the time,
Speaker 1: especially for work. But I feel like there needs I
Speaker 1: need to feel like I'm looking at a digital version
Speaker 1: of a physical page in a physical book rather than
Speaker 1: the sort of endless stream that it actually is.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and sometimes you would have to wonder, like,
Speaker 2: is it actually arbitrary which elements of composition, which like
Speaker 2: structural elements of composition, are preserved across different media, and
Speaker 2: which are not. So when you read an ebook, they
Speaker 2: almost always are going to keep the author's original paragraph breaks, right.
Speaker 2: It's not going to rearrange what's a paragraph or make
Speaker 2: shorter paragraphs or something. But the original page breaks are
Speaker 2: of no concern at all. In fact, probably even you know,
Speaker 2: the original printing of that book may have had different
Speaker 2: page breaks than whatever form the author composed it in,
Speaker 2: whether on a typewriter or handwritten or whatever. And so
Speaker 2: we've just decided that, well, the page needs to look
Speaker 2: the same in terms of where the paragraphs are broken,
Speaker 2: but not it does not need to look the same
Speaker 2: in terms of where the pages are broken, and I
Speaker 2: see no reason why, like it would have to be
Speaker 2: that way, you know.
Speaker 1: But even that, I have to admit, seems a little
Speaker 1: wrong at times, Like I don't know if this is
Speaker 1: everyone else's experience, but when I'm reading books on my kindle,
Speaker 1: I'll skip to the next page and sometimes I'll come back,
Speaker 1: or I'll know i'll accidentally turn the page and I'll
Speaker 1: turn back, and I'll notice that now the page break
Speaker 1: occurs at a different spot in the text, and that
Speaker 1: feels really wrong to me, and I feel even though
Speaker 1: there's no I don't think there's any way you could
Speaker 1: have that uniform, especially when you have the luxury of
Speaker 1: being able to change the size of the fond on
Speaker 1: the screen and so forth. But it feels weird that
Speaker 1: I shouldn't have internal consistency regarding when a page ends
Speaker 1: and when it begins.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think we have expectations established
Speaker 2: on the basis of physical printed books where you know
Speaker 2: that just doesn't change, right.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it messes me up or really pisses
Speaker 1: me off or anything, but it's just something I casually
Speaker 1: notice as I'm reading. It's like, what now the page
Speaker 1: ends on this paragraph?
Speaker 2: Well, this also makes me think about something Gibson mentions
Speaker 2: in this essay, which is he writes, quote, Medieval readers
Speaker 2: and writers were thus increasingly attentive to the visual appearance
Speaker 2: of the page, and as a result recognize the paragraph
Speaker 2: significant place within it. So it's sort of in the
Speaker 2: medieval period that the paragraph becomes an important part of reading.
Speaker 2: And I was thinking about this. You know, I have
Speaker 2: a layperson's perspective on this, so I don't know if
Speaker 2: this is a good insight, but I was at least wondering. Okay,
Speaker 2: So you look at like medieval practices of producing highly
Speaker 2: decorated texts with you know, beautiful lettering and calligraphy, illustrations
Speaker 2: and illuminations and so forth, it seems to me you
Speaker 2: find a lot less of that in earlier texts. You Like,
Speaker 2: if you look at copies of the same books from
Speaker 2: centuries earlier, for example the Bible, the earlier copies there
Speaker 2: often seems to be no attempt whatsoever to improve the
Speaker 2: esthetic qualities of the copy. It's more like the scroll
Speaker 2: is just a purely utilitarian storage medium for the text
Speaker 2: of the book. So that it, you know, wouldn't be
Speaker 2: otherwise lost or forgotten, and it would probably often be
Speaker 2: used for being read al loud. Then you again, take
Speaker 2: the same text and look at a medieval manuscript, it
Speaker 2: might be gorgeous in some way. So it seems possible
Speaker 2: that the modern concept of the paragraph emerges from a
Speaker 2: time of more literary luxury, when there's a greater emphasis
Speaker 2: on making manuscripts themselves esthetically pleasing. All right, Rob and
Speaker 2: I were just talking off Mike and we decided we
Speaker 2: have to admit defeat. By time, we had more to
Speaker 2: talk about, we didn't get to it yet, So this
Speaker 2: is going to become a two part episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe it'll give me time to find that actual
Speaker 1: perfect paragraph from some book I love. I'll look around,
Speaker 1: maybe something will pop out at me. All Right, we'll
Speaker 1: join us next time as we continue this discussion, But
Speaker 1: go ahead and write in. We'd love to hear from
Speaker 1: you if you have thoughts about the paragraph as we've
Speaker 1: discussed it thus far. Core episodes of Stuff to Blow
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