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Paragraphs
Posted on: Tue, 12/15/2009 - 09:15
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Paragraphs
One of the things I struggle with, is the size of paragraphs in some fan fics.
This is partly an eyesight issue - the wall of text isn't easy reading for me, but also its because I think that a paragraph should contain one subject, or point or idea.
Below is an example of this on a story recently posted on SIYE, Learning to Live By awellspokenbeast
Ginny sat with her mother, numb and expressionless, overwhelmed by the feelings which would otherwise be twisting her around and turning her inside out. Mere hours ago, the man who held her heart had resurfaced at Hogwarts after having been evading capture for the better part of a year and her prodigal brother returned and, despite his numerous insults to the family, he was welcomed back with open arms. Voldemort had laid siege to Hogwarts Castle and demanded the surrender of Harry Potter and when Hogwarts needed to unify in its darkest hour, it did… mostly. Then her brother was killed, crushed beneath an exploded wall, and despite she had lost already, she was a Gryffindor — she would have to endure this. Finally came Voldemort’s ultimatum, and then, shortly after midnight, came news of the death of Harry Potter, who had died running from the battle. She saw his broken body. She saw the sneers on the faces of the Death Eaters as the Sorting Hat was set ablaze on Neville Longbottom’s head and those sneers turn into grimaces as Neville beheaded Voldemort’s snake with the sword of Gryffindor. A melee broke out. Ron and Neville took down Greyback. She and Luna and Hermione dueled Bellatrix, all until Molly Weasley killed the bitch to save her life and the lives of her friends. Voldemort’s rage nearly killed her mother, but for a very timely and quite unexpected Protego and the sudden reappearance of Harry James Potter. The man she loved had died. She had seen him lifeless in Hagrid’s arms, and yet there he was. He had protected her mother from a spell from Voldemort and there he was again, wand at the ready, circling around the man who had killed him. Harry was dead and then he was alive and then he won. Even as hours passed and revelry overtook Hogwarts, it was still too much for her to handle. She felt so much that she felt nothing at all. Her brain was processing it subconsciously and for that, she was grateful.
I would have split this into seven or eight paragraphs, and probably expandd each on as well, but that's just my style.
Is this a grammar 'rule', the idea that a paragraph should contain one point or idea or just a suggestion.
Comments
When I saw the subject line, this was exactly the story which sprang to mind (it's actually sitting two tabs over waiting for me to compose a suitably chiding-yet-encouraging review).
Looking at the chapter as a whole, I can see the problem. The author is writing in a style that really requires more levels of abstraction than simply sentence/paragraph/section. That huge paragraph you quote needs to be broken up, but in a way that keeps it together as an entity.
Quite how one does this is not clear to me.
I tend towards reasonably brief paragraphs anyway, and of course I always split up separate strands of dialogue—but then sometimes a paragraph of dialogue will be longer simply because someone is saying a lot. (I'm not sure whether my habit of interspersing narrative between separate lines of dialogue within a paragraph helps, but at some point I'm going to have to get some unbiased opinion on that, I guess—my alpha reader is maybe a little too kind to me ;-)
I then group paragraphs together into sections and those into chapters. At this stage, mind you, I haven't written anything long enough to demand being broken up into separate chapters, so that last is moot.
As to the rule "one point per paragraph"…I like it. But is it OK to carry it to the logical conclusion that sometimes several paragraphs in succession should really contain just one sentence each? That is indeed so for dialogue, is it also true for narrative?
One of the things I struggle with, is the size of paragraphs in some fan fics.
This is partly an eyesight issue - the wall of text isn't easy reading for me, but also its because I think that a paragraph should contain one subject, or point or idea.
...
Is this a grammar 'rule', the idea that a paragraph should contain one point or idea or just a suggestion.
It probably depends on from whence you get your rules. :) According to my "Little, Brown Handbook", a paragraph is about 1 idea, a unity, where all its parts relate clearly to each other, and it's coherent. My teachers in school taught that too, if it matters. :)
I've seen paragraphs like you quoted and it "sets me off". When I see large paragraphs in my own writing, I examine them closely and make sure they have to be that way. As much as my personal aesthetics hate it, I've even learned to do dialog in multiple paragraphs when it makes sense. (You know, where all but the last paragraph don't have a closing quote mark).
The thing that has sensitized me the most to this is to read stories on a small screen (in my case a Nokia n770, n810, n900). At a reasonable sized font in perfect conditions, I only get about 70 chars per line and 16 lines on a screen. In less then idea conditions, I enlarge the font so I can read it and then only get 45 chars by 12 lines. So monster paragraphs on a screen like that are very hard to read because it's easy to lose your place.
Of course, the reverse can be true too. I think Jeconais has the problem at times of making a whole lot of 1 line non-dialog paragraphs. I can deal with this better, but it has it's own annoyance factor (at least to me. :)
Kevin