Peter Smith: Blog

The para­graph is a con­tinu­ing source of mys­tery to me. What makes a really good para­graph? Is it as for­mu­laic as sug­ges­ted by Thomas Bas­bøll?

Actu­ally, I’m doing a Thomas a great dis­ser­vice when I caste his writ­ing on para­graphs as being for­mu­laic. He, has writ­ten at length in a very nuanced man­ner about the para­graph (and most other aspects of writ­ing). I highly admire his approach as I’ve said elsewhere.

What I’m rebelling at is those who actu­ally take Thomas’ pre­scrip­tions at face value and say things like, “Every para­graph must com­prise five sen­tences”, or “It’s best prac­tice to have para­graphs of five sen­tences”. It’s the unthink­ing and super­fi­cial applic­a­tion of what he says that troubles me. I have a col­league who recently told me that best prac­tice was to have sen­tences of 22 to 25 words.

There is, I think often a mis­take made whereby people con­fuse the what needs to be achieved with the man­ner in which it is done. They con­flate or con­fuse the ends and the means. The work that a para­graph seeks to do, might typ­ic­ally require five sen­tences. But, depend­ing on the work of the para­graph, it might be more or less than that. Although we might gen­er­ally avoid the single-sentence para­graph, there are times when that is all that is needed.

Dif­fer­ing levels of expert­ise requires dif­fer­ing types of “explan­a­tion” or instruc­tion. So, while some­thing like this might be highly appro­pri­ate and digest­ible at one level of expertise–say that of a reg­u­lar (Unruh, 1979)—something like Thomas’es work might be more appro­pri­ate at another level—say that on an insider (Unruh, 1979). The more expli­cit rules required by, say, strangers, are fine … but where does one trans­ition to using the gen­eral prin­ciples that under­lie them?

We often hedge our bets by using words and phrases such as “Gen­er­ally”, “Often”, “For some people”, and so on. This works well, but the con­sequence is that oth­ers don’t always appre­ci­ate the con­tin­gent­ness of what we say, or they focus on the excep­tions to the extent the excep­tions are taken to be a significant–almost a majority–incidence/occurrence. This isn’t help­ful either.

My over­all, point is how do we advise in a man­ner that still allows pro­gress to the next level of expert­ise, without lock­ing one’s think­ing into a par­tic­u­lar level.

Ref­er­ences