Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the standard nugget of textual thought: the paragraph. (originally published 8/25/22)
Hey you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time for an episode from the Vault. This one originally published August twenty fifth, twenty twenty two, and it is part two of our series on the paragraph.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our series on the paragraph. Yes, the writing convention the paragraph as used in prose. In the last episode, of course, if you haven't heard that yet, you should go check that out first. But in the last episode we especially focused on the history of the paragraph, talking about the old Greek and Latin manuscripts of Scriptio continua, which is just a big old mess of letters with no case differences, no punctuation between sentences, and no spaces between words. It sounds like an absolute nightmare. And how over time that morphed into a tradition that put a greater emphasis on legibility, introducing things like spaces between words and punctuation case differences and so forth, but eventually also having this tradition of transition markers such as the pill crow, which are you know, that's the paragraph symbol. You've probably seen it before, especially in medieval manuscripts, often being a little red symbol. But then of course that over time just giving way to blank space, giving rise to the paragraph breaks that we know today now concerning the era of medieval manuscripts, where you had these red pill crows and they would be filled in by special manuscript artists known as rubricators. Again, that's actually from the Latin word meaning red, so these are the red text people. That there was a quote from a Middle English poem that I wanted to share because it struck me as so weird. This poem was cited in an essay that I'm going to refer to in this episode, and I did in the last called Past Lives of the Paragraph by Richard Hughes Gibson, published in The Hedgehog Review. But the poem goes like this, Okay, so it's in Middle English, I'll try it. It's like route is on the book without v pariffs, great and stout bullet in rose read and what's going on here? Is that the poet is using paraff symbols as a metaphor for the five wounds on the body of Christ. And in modern English this would these lines would say something like wrought on the book without five paraffs, great and stout standing out in rose read. So there you go. That's your typography and crucifixion narrative coming together in one great, glorious stew.
This is fascinating when it comes to read text. I guess the main place one sees it now is that many bibles, Christian Bibles will contain passages that are the attributed words of Christ in red, and that's a holdover from these days. Another case that stands out in my memory is the book The House of Leaves, in which I believe the word minotaur is featured in red. And that book as a whole, I think is interesting to think of in terms of something that I keep thinking of discussing the paragraph, and that is the format being part of the message, part of the communication that if you strip away paragraph breaks, it disrupts the communication that is taking place between between author and reader. And if you strip away other aspects of formatting, if you tinker with things like fonts in a negative fashion. It can also have such an effect, and that is a book for example, that if you were to alter too much about the format at all, you end up decaying the message and the intended communication of the piece.
This ties into something we talked about in the last episode, which is the somewhat arbitrary designations of which formatting decisions are considered integral to the text and which you're not. And the big example would be ebooks in the way that they break text across different pages. So you change the font size on your ebook, the different text will appear together with different page groupings. And of course this was true before e books. I mean, different printings of the same text in book form would usually not have the exact same words each page, so page layout is not considered integral, usually in a printed book, though of course it would be in a book like House of Leaves, where it's very much a work of art as well as a book. And yet paragraph breaks are considered an integral part of the text, and if you change those around, people I think would mostly have the sense that you are really altering the author's work. There, even though some teachers do it and apparently it has good effects, especially when teaching a piece of writing that has really long paragraphs.
I totally forgot to mention a book that I'm I'm currently reading, that I'm that I have that are that has errors in it. I'm reading an old ebook that I have of Frank Herbert's Heretics of Doune, and I hadn't I hadn't picked up this e book in a very long time, and the formatting was weird in it, not consistently, not enough to where I was like, should I just buy a new e book of this? Or should I press on? But occasionally paragraph breaks would be missing, and it would often occur with dialogue, so if I'm just reading along, I might miss that one character has stopped talking and another character has started talking, or that there's been some shift in a thought, and it is it was disruptive to reach those points, and I would have to stop and go back and sort of pick apart with my eyes where the actual paragraph break should have occurred, and then I would momentarily think about buying a new ebook, and then I would keep going instead.
Wait, I'm perplexed by the idea of an ebook with fixed errors in it. Okay, so you buy a video game and it's got bugs, the developers should eventually release a patch, like an update that'll download, it'll it'll fix your game, and now it won't have the bugs anymore. But you download an ebook and it's got bugs in it, and what they don't do that?
No, Well nowadays they can. Nowadays ebooks can you can essentially have a patch that goes out through like Amazon and whatnot. So I don't know. I guess this is just a super old ebook that I have of this particular text. So yeah, I should have I should have broken and bought a new ebook of it. I actually have a physical copy of it as well, and I toyed with just switching over to the physical copy, but I can't control the size of the text on that, so I kind of kind of spoiled by my Kindle.
So this old one, You're like, it would be like waiting on the developers to release a patch for the et game for the Atari.
Yeah, well, like this is clearly not the supported copy anymore, so or maybe I have something wrong in my settings. I'm not sure.
Okay, Well, one thing that I guess ties more into the history that we were talking about in the last episode is the question of when did the idea of a para for a paragraph come to symbolize more the chunk of text itself between the breaks rather than the breaks, because you know, the Originally the idea is that the marker known as the paragraphs in Greek manuscripts was like a marginal notation that signaled some kind of transition within the text. It was it was written out beside, and then over time this morphs through many stages to become line breaks and indentation. So when did we start talking about paragraphs as the text between those breaks. Well, in that article I'm in by Richard Hughes Gibson, Gibson points to examples in texts in French and English around the thirteenth or fourteenth century that seemed to start making reference to paragraphs as sub sections of text, saying things like you know, you can skip this paragraph, or talking about a text and saying, you know, refer to this paragraph. But it seems to be roughly around the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century that the more modern definition of a paragraph as the passage of text between the line breaks and indentation emerges as dominant, and Gibson points to a seventeen o six new edition of The New World of English Words, which defines a paragraph as quote a portion of matter, of discourse or treatise contained between two breaks, i e. Which begins with a new line and ends where the line breaks off. So by around that time you've got people talking about paragraphs, and they are the paragraphs that we have today. It's a chunk of texts between line breaks. But this leads to another question, which is the question of paragraph theory. What actually makes a paragraph? Surely people who study language and writing must have come up with ideas of Okay, you know, you go out and look at paragraphs and books. What are the things that paragraphs have in common? How do authors decide where to break the line? And this question is not nearly as easy to answer as you might assume, especially because you know this is not the only thing like this in the world. But it's one case where there's sort of a formal definition that you will find taught in school and that you will find in a lot of textbooks that does not at all seem to describe what happens just out in the world. And the difference here is that you've got all kinds of prescriptive definitions of the paragraph, often saying that a paragraph sort of explores a central idea or a topic. And we'll get to one major proponent of this idea in just a bit. But one person that Gibson points to in his essay is a poet and art critic named Herbert Reid, who wrote a nineteen twenty eight book on English prose style, and Gibson writes about read quote taking up his nearly century old book one recognizes a peculiar tradition in which one textbook after another, one generation after another, has promoted a blueprint for paragraph construction conspicuously at odds with the prose of the most highly acclaimed stylists of the English language. So, in other words, there's a conflict between how paragraphs are theorized in textbooks and taught in schools and how they're actually used by writers, especially the most popular writers in a culture. Good writers do not usually write comp one oh one style essays with clear topic sentences and one central idea per paragraph. How often do you come across that in a book you actually like to read?
Yeah? Not often? And you know, in fact, I was for the last episode and for this episode, I did a lot of looking around, thinking, well, I should be able to find some perfect paragraphs out there in books that I love and books that I admire. And it's really hard because if you go into it thinking about paragraphs and perhaps having at least this shadow of of this school book, this textbook paragraph in your mind, you find all sorts of things that don't really fit that form.
Absolutely. So you look at your favorite books, you are probably just not going to find too many paragraphs that have a topic sentence and then supporting sentences developing that topic idea, and then a line break when you were done with that topic, moving on to the next thing. There are some reasons we can talk about where I think it might make sense for composition classes to teach it that way, But yeah, this is just not usually what you're going to find out in the wild in the books you like. And so we're back to the question again, like what actually causes those paragraph breaks to happen where they do. They're not random. If you were to just rearrange them at random, it would probably produce a less good and less cohesive text. And yet it's very hard to actually come up with rules to explain why they come in the places they do.
I'll also say that I think that a very effective but standard, you know, sort of textbook paragraph is kind of like a brick and a cathedral. The bricks are important, and there are may be a lot of bricks in there holding things together, but they're not the part you remember. You remember the flying buttresses, you remember the gargoyles in the in the stained glass windows and the and things of that nature. And so the parts of a text, and in fact, the paragraphs of a text, they probably stand out the most to us are the ones that are weird, that are you know, big run on sentences or short little fragments that have a lot of weird things going on in them, like those are those are the things that catch our eye. Those are the ones we remember.
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think even by looking at some of the more prescriptive paragraph theorists, even if their prescriptive definitions of paragraphs don't really describe what you see in the world, they do make some observations that are useful. And one thing that's stuck with me here is that in Gibson's article, he cites an American lawyer and grammarian named Lindley Murray, who in seventeen ninety five wrote a book on English grammar called English Grammar, which makes some recommendations on how a composition should be divided into paragraphs, and literally writes that ideally a paragraph is about a single subject. Each subject should get its own paragraph, unless subjects are very short. Subjects that are very long should be divided into multiple paragraphs or getting into some vagueness about exactly what is very short or very long here, And who know, people in seventeen ninety five might have had more tolerance for very long paragraphs. I'm not sure about that, but that seems possible based on the text I've surveyed. One thing Linley Murray says that I do think is still true is that you should often try to place the paragraph breaks quote at sentiments of the most weight or that call for particular attention. So when you have to divide subjects across multiple paragraphs, you are looking for places to place the paragraph breaks that will call attention to the sentences directly before or after. And so it's interesting that Murray senses what Gibson in his essay describes as these quote hot spots places in the text, typically occurring near paragraph breaks, where the power of the words increases or is emphasized. Paragraph breaks tend to draw attention to the words right before and after them.
This is a great idea, of course, because as a writer, you want the reader to keep reading, and this kind of works like an arrow pointing from one chunk of text to the next, almost like connecting one tile in a board game to the following tile. You know where to go, and you want to go.
There, Yes, And I think at this time it's also already recognized that paragraph length plays an important role, not just in organizing the contents of a piece of writing, but also in sort of managing the energy and attention of the reader. Because again, if paragraphs are too short, the text starts to feel frivolous or insubstantial, and if paragraphs are too long, the text starts to feel tedious and overtaxing. And so balancing paragraph length serves the function of not losing the reader. But okay, it's time to talk about Alexander Bain, because when you get into paragraph theory, this is a name that is cited, and essentially every piece of writing on this subject Alexander Baine is the King of paragraph theory. So he was a professor in the nineteenth century in Scotland. He was he was the chair of Logic and the chair of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. I think he was given those posts in eighteen sixty one and he he was one of those people at the time who just had like a poker and a number of different fires. So I think he was also influential in the early development of psychology, yeah, but also logic and also English literature. So he became a teacher of composition at Aberdeen and ended up writing his own text book for his classes that was called English Composition in Rhetoric am Manuel. This was published in the eighteen sixties. It contained what a scholar called Paul Rogers called the first systematic formulation of paragraph theory. And if you ever took a comp one oh one class, you will probably recognize Bain's idea. Bain's primary concern with paragraphs was unity, that each paragraph should have what's called unity of purpose. It's doing one main thing. And he had like six rules about paragraphs. They are things like, first rule, the bearing of each sentence upon what procedes shall be explicit and unmistakable. Two, when several consecutive sentences iterate or illustrate the same idea, they should, so far as possible, be formed alike. And then three, here's the big one. The opening sentence, unless so constructed as to be obviously preparatory, is expected to indicate with prominence the subject of the paragraph. And here it is this is your topic sentence rule number three. So, for Alexander Bain, each paragraph in a composition should exhaust a single subject, and the paragraph should begin with a succinct statement of that subject, which is then to be developed in the following sentences. Don't you just thrill with the love of the English language. But Bain's ideas did prove very influential, and, according to Gibson, at least one half of the modern discourse on paragraph theory still basically derives from Bain. Gibson writes, citing another rhetorician named Mike Duncan, that there are two major schools of thought in paragraph theory. You got prescriptivists and descriptivists. Paragraph prescriptivists usually say something like the paragraph is an ideal structure with an ideal form it's based on unity of purpose. Like Bain said, it should be about one thing, and it should cover that one thing, and that form, that ideal form can be emulated by students to practice their writing. Meanwhile, paragraph descriptivists would have what Gibson calls quote a looser inductive approach to instruction, with Bain style rules limited to suggesting a structural ideal that is only rarely seen and thinking about it. I can see how there are advantages to teaching writing with each of the approaches. So the descriptive school, to my mind, saying yeah, paragraphs don't usually work that way is more honest. It is more honest about how paragraphs are actually formed in popular writing, but it's also a lot harder to teach. I mean, if the truth is that a paragraph can be anything you want it to be as long as it works, as long as it makes sense and feels good to the reader, that is a true statement. But a student probably doesn't know how to create a paragraph that works unless they're just naturally talented. So this is just not very helpful advice. So incomes the prescriptive model. It doesn't usually describe most of the paragraphs you'll find in books you like and articles you like. But it is actually something that can be taught and has a utility in creating a structure that students can use to organize their thoughts and make them clear. So it is better than nothing. It is better than not being able to write anything coherent at all. But then again, if you learn composition on the basis of the prescriptivist thought and you're writing Alexander Bain style paragraphs with topic sentences, the classic five paragraph essay for a school class, I wonder does that constrict the development of your writing skill in the domain of organic paragraphs.
Yeah, I don't know. It certainly makes me think of the old standard that you need to learn the rules before you break the rules you need. It's better to start with this rule based system and then move out from that so you'll have, you know, somewhere to go and somewhere to sort of look back to. So I can see the I certainly see the appeal of valuing both approaches to the paragraph.
Yeah, I think I can agree with that, and I guess I was sort of already getting at this. But to make it more clear, I wonder if this is just one of those things that is a product of necessity stemming from the realities of teaching. Like there's no systematic way to teach a student to be a great prose stylist, to just you know, to write great organic paragraphs that people love to read. Like, what would you tell them to do? It's no use this word here, and you know, like you probably just can't really teach that unless you're gonna stick with them their entire life and just be really intensive. But you probably can, in the course of a semester, help teach a student to better organize their thoughts more clearly with a structure like the five paragraph essay that has paragraphs with topic sentences that are each about a single subject. So I think taking a student from incoherent in writing to reasonably clear five paragraph essay with Bain style conventions, that's doable. Teaching someone to write wonderful organic paragraphs is much more challenging.
Yeah, And this is something that's going to be a no brainer to any teachers out there, and certainly to any parents of children who are are still learning how to write. I mean, I've my son's been doing pretty well, but but I mean I've seen some real dogs of paragraphs when it comes to to putting things together, because you know, I have to remind myself. I've had to remind myself in these times. It's like, yeah, he he may he reads a lot and he's he gets to see a lot of well constructed paragraphs and paragraphs that are definitely doing their job within narrative works and so forth. But you've got to start somewhere. You've got to have like some sort of basic form in mind, especially when you're doing these very you know, wrote sort of assignments where it's all about constructing, stretching the sentences, forming those sentences into paragraphs, and having you know, X number of paragraphs to illustrate a basic concept.
Yes, and in the defense of the five paragraph essay and and the Alexander Baynes style paragraph, uh, I would say that's useful for more than just producing a piece of writing somebody would actually want to read. It is useful for practicing organizing your own thoughts. I know I've said on the podcast before that I often feel like I don't really understand what I think about an issue often until I try to write about it. Writing is the process by which I realize which of my intuitions I do think are true and make sense, and which ones are not and I should just abandon It's writing for me is very much a process of figuring out what I really think and organizing those thoughts into a structure that makes sense.
Yeah, absolutely, I certainly agree with that. Oftentimes find myself in a situation where I have to write about a topic. My thoughts on the topic or just the general knowledge about that topic is kind of all over the place. But you got to start somewhere, And so just that first sentence, that first paragraph, that opening paragraph of a work, even if it's not the lead paragraph, you end up sticking with. Like that is often for me, Like that's kind of like staking a place in the ground. That's like where you begin to to actually trace out where you're going to build the rest of the thing.
Yeah, you remember, a long time ago, we did an episode that I think back on fairly often about the illusion of explanatory depth, the psychology concept where you can think you understand how something works, but you actually don't until you are forced to try to explain it. Easy example for this is do you know how to draw a bicycle with all the parts? And everybody thinks they do, but you actually try to draw one, and like, I don't know what the percentage of people is, but a huge percentage of people actually they draw a bicycle that could not work, like they don't actually know what parts connect to what and everything. And the same is true for like a toilet tank or other things that we just think we understand how they work until we have to get explicit and into the details about it. And writing can be an exercise like that, Like trying to draw the bicycle, it helps you realize what you thought you understand or new, but don't. You don't actually, so now you've got to go back and figure things.
Out right now.
I was thinking about another difference between the you know, the lovely organic paragraph that sort of moves on its own terms and you can't really say what exactly the rules for its structure are, versus the Alexander bain style prescriptive topic sentence paragraph. And I think one difference is simply that these are achieving different goals. One is style and the other is clarity. And if, like a fiction book, we're full of Baines style paragraphs, I think that would obviously become very tedious and unpleasant to read. So, of course there's the idea that good prose stylists don't usually follow this format. And yet I can think of documents where I would much rather have the document read in an Alexander Bain style instead of having you know, sort of more loosey goosey organic paragraphs. And examples would be things like an article in a science journal or a medical article, or a legal document, or a list of instructions for building something, basically anywhere that clarity and logical organization are more important than style and energy and pleasure of reading. I think that the ban style structure is a good approach.
Yeah, yeah, this is an interesting point, and it made me think of how I use a lot of texts for work and for research, because I think an interesting aspect of the text to think about here is skimmability for texts that are not expressly for pleasure. You know, certainly, if it's something I'm using for research purposes. In some cases, I read the entire book, you know, I've covered to cover. Other times, I'm in there to get specific things from that author. I know there's specific topics, or it's a specific part of a study that I'm interested in, and for that yeah, breaks in paragraph structure are pretty important because I need to be able to move around in that I'm not going to eat at all. I need to be able to pick out the things I want, and so it helps if those morsels are separated from each other on the platter.
I think there are also these are the kind of documents that in many cases would benefit from being removed from the flowing prose style altogether and just become lists of bullet points.
Yeah, yeah, I mean you see this as instructions, right, as simply guidelines and whatnot. They're generally not going to be arranged in multi paragraph form. It's going to be bullet points in numbers and also illustrations and so forth. But you do find this with recipes, I guess. But even then you'll have numbers or bullet points in there as well, so you can easily skip from this paragraph to this paragraph. So it's very clear on which step am.
I on totally. I mean, I love organic flowing pros, but I don't want it in a recipe.
But you will get it in your recipe on every recipe blog out there. And I think you often hear people grive about this, and I think it's because of that collision of two things. You'll often have an organic, organic paragraphs forming this this conversational blog post about a particular recipe about a particular drink or food culture, whatever it happens to be. But then this article also contains the recipe, a thing that is very much a situation where you want to go in, get what you need, jump in at the right step, and get out again. And if you're hit with both styles, I mean, that can be a little bit jarring.
Yeah, especially if it's not so I was going to qualify what I said with like, oh, okay, I can understand, you know, sort of a thing that's two parts. It's like the recipe as a list of instruct clear instructions with bullet points, and then above that like an article that explains in more detail. But it does get frustrating, like if it's not clear at first glance whether you need to read the article or not in order to make the recipe, You're like, am I going to be missing something if I don't read all this text right?
And one of the problems I think with with blog posts is it comes down to formatting. Because if you have a really good book, like I have a few different books on cocktails, and those are often nice because they're very well formatted and you can easily see where is the cocktail recipe and where is the you know, the article, where's the prose about this cocktail or the history of the cocktail, et cetera. But if you're dealing with a blog format, I mean, there are some great blog templates out there, but you don't always have that much freedom, and you're often left doing something that is a little morelike blog post at the top, recipe at the bottom, or worse, I guess, is something where there is no distinction, where the recipe is just immersed within the more pros based blog post.
So, in thinking about paragraphs and organization of pieces of writing, I was looking at an interesting article called the Music of Form, Rethinking Organization and Writing by Peter Elbow, which was published in College Composition and Communication in two thousand and six. And the main thing I wanted to mention from this Most of this essay is about Elbow talking about possibly thinking of writing as analogous to music and having music style organizational techniques. But I want to start with this metaphor. So Elbow describes a painting. He uses the example of Edward Hopper's Night Hawks and says, you know, okay, we're humans. We're able to stand several feet back from this painting and see it as a whole. Right, you can just look at it. You can see the whole thing, and you can understand it as a composition of different parts that emerges from how they all come together at once. But then he says, okay, now take the same painting and imagine instead that you are an ant. You can only look at the painting a little bit at a time by crawling over the surface of it, and thus your idea of the whole painting has to come together a little bit at a time and involves your use of memory of what parts you previously looked at, and probably also some imagination of what parts you haven't looked at yet. And then Elbow writes quote, when we read a text, we are like the ant. The text is laid out in space across multiple pages, but we can only read one small part at a time. We may jump around the text Grasshopper like, especially with long texts, looking at chapter titles and other headings, browsing the openings and closings of chapters looking for quote perspective. Some texts lead off with an abstract, as this journal now asks. Books have tables of contents, but still we can take in relatively few words at a time. So here's my question. If texts are spatial phenomena, and yet our experience of them is necessarily tim porrel, how can we best organize texts for readers? How could we organize paintings for ants?
This is great. I love this way of thinking about it, the ant crawling over the painting, trying to form this idea of what the painting looks like. And I think that gets down to one of the problems of thinking, Oh, I'm going to find that great paragraph in that book. I love because no paragraph, for the most part. There may be some exceptions, and maybe I can think of one or two, but they're so rare. For the most part, the paragraph, any given paragraph, is not a miniaturization of the larger work, and cannot properly convey the idea of the larger work. Right.
I thought this metaphor was so interesting because it's true, and that, like a lot of the stuff people do, you like. Conventions of writing, like the Alexander Baynes style paragraph or the five paragraph essay and a composition class are designed to give you a structure that would help an ant understand what the whole painting is even after even while they're only you know, crawling over a bit of it at a time, because it's so familiar. You know what the structure is, you know where you are within it at any given time, you know roughly what the whole thing's going to look like, and that that type of mapping or sign posting does provide some some perspective to you know, the ant crawling over the painting or the human being reading a text. And yet they come with disadvantages, and Elbow identifies a number of them, but one he talks about is the idea of energy. Like that a text with good organic paragraphs that are not organized in such a you know, mapped out and signposted way, they tend to have more more power to pull you along and make you want to keep reading and feel more like music, have those kind of interesting little melodies and themes that recur. He calls this other style, you know, the non signposted style, dynamic organization. And one interesting comparison that he makes is that his dynamic organization can have not just style advantages. It's not just more interesting and pleasant to read kind of organic paragraphs that are not so signposted. It can have a revelatory power of its own. It can actually show you things that a well mapped, signposted paragraph or essay cannot. And the example he uses is a comparison to platonic dialogues. This comes from an author named Burke writing about Plato's dialogue the Phadrus, and Burke writes the following quote for a platonic dialogue is not formed simply by breaking an idea into its component parts and taking them up in a one two three order, the purely scholastic aspect. In Aristotle's method of exposition, a platonic dialogue is rather a process of transformation, whereby the position at the end transcends the position at the start, so that the position at the start can eventually be seen in terms of the new motivation encountered on route. And I think that that's a great point of comparison, because a lot of good writing has the quality of following the author's thoughts, so we're not just seeing like a presentation of pre approved informational tidbits, you know, arranged into paragraph form, but we are actually discovered the author is showing us something about how they come to an idea, they get from here to there. They're taking us along the way with them, and that can be just as enlightening as a clearly organized list of conclusions.
Yeah, and of course the style is going to inform so much of how you understand the inner workings of an author's mind and how you connect with it. Like, for instance, Borges is going to have a totally different feel for his paragraphs compared to Hunter S. Thompson. One. With Thompson's paragraphs, there's more of this sort of crackling live wire intensity to them, directing one thought to the next, whereas Borjes is gonna he's gonna take his time, and he's it's more like a like like a like a vapor drifting through a wing of a library. Uh and uh and and so they're they're totally different experiences, and they're giving you a snapshot into the way connections are forming in the author's minds.
Oh yeah, sure, I mean, I guess I've mainly now been thinking about nonfiction writing, but you get into fiction, Yeah, that's a totally different ballgame. Also, But anyway, a lot of this essay seems to play on this metaphor of music and how you could think about UH writing as as analogous to music in various ways, and how that also helps you think about compromises between the the highly organized, sign posted structure of like the five paragraph essay versus the dynamic organization of the organic paragraph, and how you can you can blend them together to to to have maximum effect.
Yeah, there's this great bit from Elbow and I read here quote whole texts need larger global pieces of energy. It's not enough if paragraphs or sections hold together and pull us through from one to another. We also need a sense of the whole as whole, a matter that Williams treats. But very briefly, this energy comes from the same forces that hold music together, sequences of expectation and eventual satisfaction, larger melodic or harmonic rhythms, or examples of what I am calling the music of form. So yeah, this interests me because the author here mentions the use of story thinking at times, and this brought to mind the formulate nature of most storytelling and fiction weaving endeavors. You know, certain structures are going to be followed, certain tropes are going to be invoked, and this does present a kind of form that pulls us along. For instance, many of the movies we discussed on Weird House Cinema follow very expected structures and invoke expected elements, And while this certainly can make a movie doing experience feel too formulaic, in some cases, it can also provide the necessary pull. The genre trappings can often serve as a kind of airport conveyor belt that makes it easier to move through the work. You put up with the humdrum human interactions because you know that genre it demands that some of these humans are about to be eaten by a monster or knifed in the back by a slash, or whatever the case may be, and that may be the aspect you're far more interested in. Also playing into the idea of expectation in music, I mean this brings me back to some of our past discussions of music, that it's not only about expectations being met, but expectations being subverted. So you think that the next note is going to do this, but then it does that, and that's what makes it fabulous, And that too, is one of the great things in film, but also in writing, like it's the beat that you think is coming, the rhyme that you think is coming, or whatever the case may be, it ends up being something else instead. And if you if you tease it apart and tear it apart, that may seem more mundane, but in the actual experience of the thing it can be it can just give you chills.
Yeah, And I think that that is one way in which reading and music are very similar. I mean elbows correct that you know, you can only sort of experience them in a linear way, like one moment at a time. You can't hear a whole piece of music at once or read a whole piece of writing at once. And so it's that process of having to go through one bit at a time in a linear way that makes these prediction subversion patterns so important. It's something about creating a great piece of music or a great piece of writing has to do with finding the right balance of meeting expectations and then subverting expectations.
Like just just to come back to to to be movies for a second, Like sometimes the subversion that works is accidental. Sometimes it's the fact that the monster jumps out and doesn't look right. That looked like the effect doesn't work like that is not the subversion that the filmmakers were going for. If left of their own devices and being if they were able to achieve everything they wanted to achieve, it may have not. The finished work may not have been that different from the works that inspired it. But sometimes just an error in style or a weirdness of effect can subvert expectations in a way that makes it memorable. Like Jason takes Manhattan when the mask finally comes off and he looks a little little weird, a little arly. Yeah, like that, that's memorable because that's not really what you were expecting based on previous experiences with the form, with the with the Jason movie, and what an unmasking has previously been.
I don't think they made him cute on purpose. I think that was a that was a felicitous accident. Yeah, Rob, did you tell me before we started recording that you found a book with no paragraph breaks in it?
Yes? Yes, this morning, in fact, I was looking around on my bookshelf and I was asking myself, Okay, which of these has some great paragraphs? And it's got to be another great paragraph, another great intro paragraph, and I did find a nice intro paragraph in another Alan Robe Grulet book. But I also realized, oh, I do own a book that has I think no paragraph breaks in the text itself, and it achieves this through It's kind of cheating, I guess. But it is a book you might be familiar with, Joe. It's titled one hundred and four Stories by Thomas Bernard, the Voice Imitator. So Thomas Bernard in this book is writing short shorts. These are very short stories. They are all, as far as I can tell and remember, one paragraph long. The paragraphs range and size. Some of them are rather lengthy paragraphs, some of them are very short. But in every case I believe the paragraph is the complete story. Therefore, there are not really paragraph breaks within each work. Now, there are certainly paragraph breaks between works, but each story itself has no paragraph breaks.
Okay, So you can look at this as a work with no paragraph breaks or work with extreme paragraph breaks where every break is the end of the text.
I guess, yeah. Like, just to give an example, this is certainly a book worth picking up if anyone out there is interested in short shorts as a form, which I do find quite fascinating because at times, especially when I'm getting into Borges, I keep thinking, well, it's the shorter works that are really the ones that resonate with me the most. You know, some sort of like Philip K. Dick's story that just is about a little idea, and so this is kind of the extreme form of it. But for example, there is a story in here titled Hotel Vauldhaus, and this is the complete story one paragraph. We had no luck with the weather, and the guests at our table were repellent in every respect, been spoiled, niedts she for us. Even after they had had a fatal car accident and had been laid out in the church in Sills, we still hated them. Complete story.
Well, that reminds me. So there's another author I've been reading recently who I love, who also has some very short short stories named Lydia Davis. Do you know Lydia David?
I don't think I know that one though. Oh.
She writes a lot of like really great, excruciatingly observed relationship stories that are just full of like horrible, grown inducing details and dynamics, but they're wonderful. She's a great writer, and she has a lot of single paragraph stories that are really good nice.
So yeah, I guess it comes down to yea, depending on how you shake it and depending on how you discuss paragraphs. There are works out there that have no paragraph breaks. But but yeah, the the extreme interpretation of that would just be works I guess that are just big vomit of just a big bolus of of work of words, words and symbols, right, I mean it just when you lose the form, you lose the message, Like the format is part of the communication. Is just something I keep coming back to and thinking about this topic.
Okay, So if somebody was teaching something you wrote in a classroom, you wouldn't want you would not want them to go in and insert paragraph breaks where you did not have them.
I mean, I don't know, I don't I would guess throw them in if you need to.
Oh okay, no, I see what you're saying. Then it is part of the message. But you're not gonna be so precious that you couldn't add a few extra right.
Well. I think part of this exploration in paragraphs has made me question that the use of paragraph breaks and other works, especially older works like I really kind of took it for granted, you know, some some paragraphs are long, summer short. I didn't really think that about the idea of even breaking them up. And now I'm looking back and I'm thinking, well, you know, Borhees has going a little long in this opening paragraph to this story. And indeed he does go pretty His paragraphs tend to be kind of chonky, especially some of the opening paragraphs. But I'm not saying I would break up his text. It's not my place. But I guess if someone came around and broke some of my text up, I would be like, Okay, yeah, it's probably better. You probably probably improved it. Hey.
So we got to end with a call to the listeners here because there was something we were curious about that we couldn't really find good answers to, which is, are there languages where paragraph organization is significantly different than it is like in English that we're familiar with bilingual listeners who read and write in other non English languages, any interesting differences in how paragraphs are used in those languages, or is there a language without paragraphs at all that you can tell us about.
Yeah, I wasn't able to find any good answers on this myself looking around there weren't there weren't any discussions about it. I certainly I didn't see it addressed in any papers. So yeah, I would love to hear from anyone out there who can speak to this. It seems like it seems like the answer is yes, there are things like paragraphs or paragraphs in other languages. And I didn't see anything about there being particular language traditions today where there are no paragraphs, but maybe there are. Maybe I missed something, So definitely write in and let us know, tell us, And certainly the call remains open paragraphs that you love in particular works, especially again, I'm fascinated by opening paragraphs, and part of that is like thinking, like newspapery about things that this is the hook. This is the thing that you are presenting the reader with to get them to keep going. So what is the opening dish? What is the appetizer that will make us remain seated for the remainder of the meal? If you have great examples of that, write in let us know. Or perhaps there are some other works out there you can think of in which there are no paragraph breaks. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. You will find them and these Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed Core episodes come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays Short Form Artifact or Monster Factor, so it's come out on Wednesdays. On Mondays, we do listener mail. On Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.
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