The crafting of clear, coherent paragraphs is the subject of considerable stylistic debate. The form varies among different types of writing. For example, newspapers, scientific journals, and fictional essays have somewhat different conventions for the placement of paragraph breaks.
A common English usage misconception is that a paragraph has three to five sentences; single-word paragraphs can be seen in some professional writing, and journalists often use single-sentence paragraphs.[7]
English students are sometimes taught that a paragraph should have a topic sentence or "main idea", preferably first, and multiple "supporting" or "detail" sentences that explain or supply evidence. One technique of this type, intended for essay writing, is known as the Schaffer paragraph. Topic sentences are largely a phenomenon of school-based writing, and the convention does not necessarily obtain in other contexts.[8] This advice is also culturally specific, for example, it differs from stock advice for the construction of paragraphs in Japanese (translated as danraku 段落).[9]
See also
Inverted pyramid (journalism)
Notes
Edwin Herbert Lewis (1894). The History of the English Paragraph. University of Chicago Press. p. 9.
Bringhurst, Robert (2005). The Elements of Typographic Style. Vancouver: Hartley and Marks. p. 39. ISBN 0-88179-206-3.
Bringhurst, Robert (2005). The Elements of Typographic Style. Vancouver: Hartley and Marks. p. 40. ISBN 0-88179-206-3.
Tinker, Miles A. (1963). Legibility of Print. Iowa: Iowa State University Press. p. 127. ISBN 0-8138-2450-8.
"<br>: The Line Break element". MDN Web Docs. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
Kowwalski, E. (3 June 2008). "Peano paragraphing". blogs.ethz.ch.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Paragraph Development". The Writing Center. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved 20 June 2018.
Braddock, Richard (1974). "The Frequency and Placement of Topic Sentences in Expository Prose". Research in the Teaching of English. 8 (3): 287–302.
com), Kazumi Kimura and Masako Kondo (timkondo *AT* nifty . com / Kazumikmr *AT* aol . "Effective writing instruction: From Japanese danraku to English paragraphs". jalt.org. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
References
