September 5, 2023 • 41 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the standard nugget of textual thought: the paragraph. (originally published 8/23/22)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, we had a day
off this week, so we are bringing you an episode
from the vault, and this is part one of our
series on the paragraph. Yes, the literary device, the chunk
of text. What is the paragraph? Where does it come from?
How does it work? This episode originally published on August
twenty third, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
All right, let's jump right in.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And in today's episode, I
wanted to take a look at a writing convention and
that is the paragraph or the paragraph break. I think
there was a single moment of genesis in my desire
to do this episode, and it's that, you know, some
number of weeks back, I was doing research for some
(01:10):
episode and I ended up looking up an archived plain
text version of an old book.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Rob.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I'm sure you've had this issue on the show before.
So you get plain text and the text is there,
but all the original parag breaks are messed up. Like
they're either in the wrong place or there are no breaks,
and I was like trying to read it. I was
just like, this is horrible. I hate this. Even though
the whole text is here, I'm basically incapable of reading it. Somehow,
(01:41):
the existence of paragraphs with reasonable breaks is what makes
a massive text physically consumable to.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Me, right, and certainly, if it is supposed to be paragraphs,
it's supposed to have paragraph breaks in it. It's like
if someone were to bring a seven course meal to
you and say, here, here it is in stew form,
please enjoy it. I mean, and it hasn't been blended
up in this scenario at all. So it's not like
it is garbled. All of it is still there, but
(02:11):
here it is without the little breaks. Here it is
just all, you know, either either in the same pot
or even just mashed together on the same plate. No, no, no,
I want these. We need these breaks between these different
things that we're going to consume. There needs to be
an order to what is occurring.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Right, Why not just put the tira massou in the
clam chowder and then you get it all at once. Yeah,
And so this got me thinking about paragraphs in general,
and wondering about where they come from historically, and why
we build them the way that we do, if there
even is a consistent way that we build them, and
all kinds of questions like this, And one thing I
(02:48):
thought might be interesting to get us kicked off today
is to just talk about the literary effect, the effect
on the reader when you're reading a book with a
lot of long paragraph versus short paragraphs, Like how does
that change the experience of reading and the impression created.
I'm sure other people have different ways of answering this,
(03:10):
but one immediate distinction I thought of in my own
reading experience has to do with the feeling of substance
versus the feeling of momentum, and I would explain it
like this. When I think about good books with very
short paragraphs, I tend to think about readability and hookiness.
Like Airport thriller novels. They tend to have very short paragraphs,
(03:33):
and those short paragraphs are I think effective for what
they're meant to do. That they tend to make the
text easy to read. They make it feel like it's
fast moving and inviting. It wants to keep you reading,
making you less likely to put the book down. Meanwhile,
when I think about good books with very long paragraphs,
I tend to think about literary richness, like obsessive observation
(03:58):
or description or insight texts that feel like they are
packed with detail and texture and thoughtfulness. So, in trying
to like balance out those two different advantages you get
from different paragraph lengths, I came up with a kind
of perhaps silly metaphor, but I started thinking about trips
to bring groceries in from the car. You know, you
(04:19):
ever go out shopping, you have a bunch of different things,
and you can, you know, you can take one or
two bags each time, or you can try to do
everything in one go, but sometimes that's impossible and you
have to stop halfway to the door. So like when
your paragraphs are too short, it's almost like you're trying
to bring the groceries in one item at a time.
Something just starts to feel kind of insubstantial and absurd
(04:41):
about what you're doing. But if paragraphs are too long,
that's kind of like trying to bring everything in in
one trip, and you just stop, like you have to
put it down and decide, okay, I can't do this,
So you're kind of balancing mobility, the mobility of carrying
less with the substance of carrying more.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
I think that's a good that's an interesting life thinking
about it that certainly, because the other side of that
is I'm instantly thinking of the person that is obscenely
trying to carry all the groceries in in one go,
like you know, and I think I've tried to do
this before, where you're just you have multiple grocery bag
straps on each hand, you have something on your arm,
(05:21):
a sort of cradling something. Yeah, and then yeah, I
guess you're planning on opening the door with your foot
or just slamming into it, or hoping there's somebody on
the other side to help you in. And here's the thing,
as the reader, like I'm either the door or I'm
the person on the other side of the scenario, and
you just want to be like calmed down a little bit,
like I bought the book, or I rented the book,
(05:43):
or I borrowed the book from the library, whatever the
case may be. We can get to all this. We
don't have to have it all in the first paragraph.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Right, And this is not I think this is not
unique to modern readers. I mean, people who are writing
handbooks of composition and rhetoric in centuries past warned that
overly long paragraphs have the effect of quote over taxing
the reader. There's something about unbroken blocks of text that
just gets tiresome. And somehow, even though the text continues
(06:13):
either way, just putting more breaks in between, separating that
in the smaller chunks, smaller paragraphs somehow makes the text
feel lighter and like you're just sort of like skipping
over it at at a breezy pace, as opposed to
getting bogged down and feeling this weight.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
I was looking around for different writings on paragraphs and
I actually came across a nineteen sixty eight paper titled
writing Paragraphs by Culkin at All and it is J. R.
Tolkien himself, and wow, weird weirdly enough, one of the
co authors was a professor at Memphis State in Tennessee.
I didn't get to the bottom of how these individuals
(06:50):
all came together being credited on the same paper, but
it gets into some of the basics and challenges and
goals of teaching effective writing. But even in this paper,
the authors point out that the unity of a given
paragraph is often illusory, a longer paragraph, they point out,
can often be broken into without upsetting anything. And they
(07:11):
point out, for instance, this is often done at certainly
at the editing phase and newspapers. The author wrote a
paragraph it's a little bit too long looking on the screen,
you just chop that sucker in half, and a lot
of times you can do that without any ill effect.
And likewise they point out that the reverse is true.
In many cases. You can take shorter paragraphs and kind
of combine them together and you're not going to effectively
(07:32):
break anything. So that's I think that's something interesting to
keep in mind, even though at the same time they
are acknowledging that, yeah, a lot of paragraph writing is
about Okay, here's your this is the stuff we all
learn in school, right here is our topic sentence. Then
we have supporting sentences, and the paragraph is supposed to
be this one concise nugget of thought for us to consume.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Well, that's a great transition to the next thing I
wanted to get at, which is that you know, of
course we're talking about reporting our subjective feelings as a
reader on you know, reading paragraphs of different lengths. But
the other side of the approach to paragraphs is the
more prescriptive approach. You know, here's what a paragraph must do,
with the most famous or if you like, infamous prescription
(08:18):
being that a paragraph must develop a single idea, and
that idea must be announced near the beginning of the
paragraph in a topic sentence, and then there must be
supporting sentences. And you know, we can talk more about
the prescriptive idea of the paragraph later, I guess. But anyway,
I find it interesting to consider the surface level paradox
(08:38):
that paragraphs are absolutely essential to most modern readers. I
think you and I are probably not unique in this.
Like the prospect of reading a book or even a
long article that's just a single, unbroken block of text
makes my blood run cold. I could not do it.
And yet it is difficult to explain exactly what the
(08:59):
rule rules are for creating paragraphs like they're essential. But
attempts to codify them in a universal way, I would argue,
and I think we will argue later on pretty much
universally failures, at at least at describing the way paragraphs
are actually used in popular writing. You know, so, questions
(09:20):
about where do we break the line and why are
in some ways still kind of elusive, even though breaking
the line is a must.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Now, I don't know how successful this will be, but
I did at least think, is it possible to mention
favorite paragraph breaks in writing? I was struggling to have
any like obviously I have a lot of bits of
writing that are a paragraph, but I was struggling to
think of examples where the break of the paragraph is
what I admire in the writing, as essential as it
(09:51):
is to a piece of writing as a whole.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Yeah, I was once you brought this up. I was
thinking on it on my own here, and I was thinking, well, okay,
what are bits that stand out to me in writing?
And I found that a lot of times the things
that come to me the easiest are opening lines or
sometimes closing lines from novels, and a lot of those
a lot of the time, if not all the time.
It's super short. It's often not even perhaps a true
(10:16):
clinical paragraph in that it is actually just one line.
And like a couple of examples that I instantly thought of,
Dante's Inferno has a great one in the of course
we're getting into poetry here, we're getting into stanzas, but
it is effectively a sentence in the middle of the
journey of our life. I came to myself in a
dark wood for the straightway was lost. An even better example,
(10:39):
and this is from an actual novel. This is from
Alan Rogue Grills The Voyeur. It just begins with a
short sentence it was as if no one had heard.
And I always loved that one because it's so evocative,
like what is the thing that no one had heard?
Why had they not heard it? And who is making
or what is making the sound? Like it asked so
(11:00):
many questions that I have to keep moving. Another good
one Fahrenheit four fifty one by Ray Bradberry. It was
a pleasure to burn.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Oh that's interesting. So these prose works. I've read these,
but I did not recall the opening paragraphs being a
single line.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah. A couple of other ones that came to mind.
Neurom Anser by William Gibson. The sky above the port
was the color of television turned to a dead channel
or this is a famous one as well. From Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. We
were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert
when the drugs began to take hold, Yeah, that's another
(11:37):
good one.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
So you're a fan of the short, possibly single sentence
opening paragraph in fiction at least.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Yeah, Yeah, there's something about just like that one line
that's really there. Really either either it really makes me
think and established as kind of a vibe, or in
some cases it establishes a different definite setting or scenario
rather succinctly. For instance, the Gibson one a certain it's
really more about vibe. The Voyeur quote is more about vibe.
(12:05):
The Hunter S. Thompson one is vibe and setting. It
gives you a sense of where we're going and sort
of what is going on. I was obviously I'm a
big fan of Dune, so I thought, well, what was
the first line of doing I can't remember it off
the top of my head. There, if you skip past
the quote from the Princess, the first line is in
the week before their departure to Aracus, when all the
(12:26):
final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an
old crone came to visit the mother of the boy Paul.
Now that's that's not a paragraph that I would just say,
oh I put that on a T shirt for me,
or or can I have that inscribed in my flesh.
But it is a great, a great opening line that
just establishes exactly what is going on and gives you,
(12:48):
you know, it gives you some mystery. I guess you
don't know what Aracus is at this point, and you
were instantly wondering, well, who is this old crone? And
it sets the story and it does a good job
of just just having us dived directly into the action. Really,
but I couldn't remember or just looking around really quickly
find an example of a multi sentence paragraph, particularly an
(13:11):
opening paragraph from a work that I held to a
really high standard. I don't know how about you, Joe.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
I'm sure if I had more time thinking about this,
I could come up with good examples, but I have not,
because again, I think paragraph breaks are essential, but I
have not scrutinized individual breaks enough that they really like
stick with me, there's something that is essential, but they
mostly to me, become invisible in a text. I don't
remember where the line breaks happen.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Usually, Yeah, if a paragraph is put together effectively and
it's doing its job, you don't notice. That's one of
the things about it. I've never had the experience of
reading something to think, yeah, that's a great place for
a paragraph break, I might think the other the opposite
of that, I might think, couldn't we have broken this
up a little bit more Frank Herbert or whoever I'm
(14:01):
happening to read, And it's not necessarily I was thinking
about this as well, like, what is the experience of
reading a text that is not just one big breakless
paragraph but has, but does have some rather expansive paragraphs.
I find that sometimes when I'm looking at this page,
I still have a gut instinct that it looks like work,
(14:22):
Like you know what I'm saying, Like, even though the
thing is, if it's a book that I'm even halfway
interested in, it's not like big paragraphs are a stumbling
block to me. It's not like I get lost in
them or I'm not going to finish them. It's not
like I need to, you know, artificially throw in paragraph breaks.
From my own reading, it works just fine. But there's
something maybe it's like a callback to early reading experiences,
(14:45):
but there's sort of that initial impact in my psyche
where it's like, oh, these paragraphs are too long, what
is this author doing? Oh?
Speaker 2 (14:52):
This is funny though, because inserting your own paragraph breaks
in the work of an author who otherwise creates really
unholy chunks. This is something that some teachers actually do,
and one specific writer I was reading for this episode
talks about doing so. One of the main things I
was reading in preparation for this was a great essay
(15:14):
by a scholar named Richard Hughes Gibson called Past Lives
of the Paragraph which was published in the Hedgehog Review.
That's an interdisciplinary culture journal based out of the University
of Virginia. And I'll refer back to this article several
times in the episode, but towards the end of his article,
Gibson tells a story about how several years back he
(15:36):
was trying to prepare a reading for students, and this
was by a critic who, well, i'll just hear read
from what Gibson writes. Quote said critic had a pensioned
for composing labyrinthine paragraphs, which I now realized would quickly
exhaust my students. Although I felt a tinge of compunction
about tampering with those paragraphs, I set to work and,
(15:59):
knowing this was the only way of salvaging the reading,
the breaks came easily, though, and I soon found the
work enjoyable. I was seeing the piece in a new way,
and I quote discovered several remarkable sentences that I had
overlooked while navigating my way through the labyrinths. And then
he also says that this did indeed make this article
(16:19):
much more enjoyable for the students, and he just started
doing it in all his other classes. When somebody has
huge paragraphs, he would just go in and edit them
to add in paragraph breaks, and you could see. I
don't know, an author might be mad to find out
somebody was doing that to their work, but you can
also clearly see the advantage.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Yeah. Yeah, It does make me wonder if there are
new editions of books that come out that engage in this,
or is it considered forbidden? You know, I don't know.
I'd be very curious to hear about this. When I
was looking around for some other info about this, I
did run across a paper titled how to write a
(16:58):
thesis according to to Echo by unburd to Echo, And
in it, he briefly touches on the paragraph and he
writes the following quote begin new paragraphs. Often do so
when logically necessary and when the pace of the text
requires it. But the more you do it, the better.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
That's funny because Echo has a tendency to write some
really long paragraphs. But I mean, in his defense, a
lot of his long paragraphs are full of exactly that
quality of richness that I was mentioning earlier, Like the
long paragraphs feel substantial, They're full of detail and insight.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah. This, of course, I was thinking about other authors
that I've really loved over the years, and I started
thinking about Cormick McCarthy, of course, who is often very succinct,
especially in his later works, or really most of his
works passed like the first novel its name leaves me
at the moment, but his first novel is a little
bit denser. But a lot of his later work, especially
(17:57):
his more recent work, is often characterized by being just,
you know, very succinct, short sentences, no quotation marks. But
occasionally you get a nice, like super run on long
sentence that is essentially like a big paragraph that is
almost the opposite of what we're talking about here, where
it just keeps going and going, but at the same
(18:17):
time it has a rhythm to it and an intensity,
and the mere fact that it won't end. Is like
it's like a crazed thought being poured directly into your
brain and you can't quite turn it off.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah, long paragraphs can definitely lend themselves to a kind
of obsessive, immersive or stream of consciousness quality to the text.
It's you know, when you are like stuck deep in
somebody else's brain and you're not coming up for air,
that that's often going to be a long paragraph.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's almost like there's a conversational
aspect to paragraph breaks, like this is the amount of
text that is occurring before the speaker pauses, has a
sip of their beverage, gives you an opportunity to think
or say something in return. But it's just that paragraph.
Then perhaps you're being preached at I was thinking of.
(19:12):
I also was thinking, Okay, obviously, paragraph breaks. I think
we all agree that these are great. But surely there's
somebody out there who's gotten a bit experimental and decided
I will craft a work of fiction that has no
paragraph breaks. And I don't remember ever encountering anything like this.
I've certainly read books that, for instance, don't have quotation
(19:32):
marks for dialogue or I think I've read books that
don't have indentions on new paragraphs. I'm trying to remember
what this would have been. I think it was an
Anthony Burgess book, but I don't recall. I've certainly read
books where you have, you know, large sections written in
fictional slang, etc. But I've never encountered anything that is
one massive chunk of text. I looked around to see
(19:55):
if such a thing existed, and I did find some
threads on like a creative writing board message board where
someone was like, Hey, I'm thinking of writing something with
no paragraph breaks. What does everyone think? And there were
some great answers, you know, people were like, well, I
think it's gonna be hard for folks to digest. I
think it's gonna you know, they're gonna potentially recoil from
(20:16):
seeing that big, massive block of text. And so it
was interesting because, yeah, there's so many things you can
you can break and play with as a writer potentially,
and more so if you know what you're doing. But
when it comes to the paragraph break, it does seem
like there is something from the modern standpoint anyway, that
is essential about it.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yes, and I think this will make a great transition
to talking a bit about the history of the paragraph,
where paragraphs come from, because if you go back far
enough in history, you're going to find a lot of
literature that is made entirely with that block of text mentality. Man,
you hate big, blocky masses of text. Look at like
(20:57):
an ancient Greek manuscript and just feel the chill.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, that's and I was. I was looking at some
of these examples, and and so I couldn't help but
think a lot about the medium involved too. So, like
if you go back and look at super old examples
of writing that have survived, you're looking at things like
oracle bones, which you know, oftentimes you're dealing with with
like say the bones from a turtle, part of the shell,
(21:21):
that sort of thing with inscriptions on it, or you're
dealing with with like wooden strips. You see that sometimes
from from from from from from you know, Indian traditions.
There's also, of course, the use of clay tablets, and
a lot of times you're you you probably have to realize, okay,
this is this was relatively expensive and it consumed a
(21:43):
lot of time and energy. So you would want to
fit as much text on one of those as possible,
and at the same time, there's only so much text
you could get on there, you know, like how many
thoughts could you effectively encode into an oracle bone? And
even if you're in even of what you're putting down
is certainly maybe not a diary entry, but it's more
(22:03):
about just recording figures and facts and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Well, I do think a lot of the conventions of
writing might be contingent on the differences between a document
scarcity culture and a document rich culture, which I think
we you know, sort of came up when we were
talking about the history of technologies for duplicating documents. That
you know, people just have different ways of approaching writing
(22:29):
when written documents are something that is expensive and scarce
versus when they're just you know, cheap to make and
all over the place.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah. So yeah, from our modern standpoint, I was trying
to think of what is my relationship with paragraph breaks,
and I tend to think of it as kind of
like the breath of the text. You know, it's the
fluctuating intensity of the author's mental process. And I also
feel that, you know, with a very visual mind and
one hone for fiction reading by film viewing to a
(22:59):
large degree, I think, you know, like I was viewing
films and viewing TV before I was reading, and so
to a certain extent, the paragraph breaks are also sort
of like stage direction, like look at this, now, look
at this, and they can help drive home shifts in tone,
intensity and character and so forth. So it's, you know,
from our modern standpoint, the format is part of the signal.
(23:22):
Strip the format away, and the signal is degraded, like
that big block of text. If you take any given work,
you know, you take up it. Certainly, if you take
something like any of the books that we've discussed so far,
and you take all the paragraph breaks out, it's not
going to be the same because it's like the breath
patterns of the voice speaking to you are altered. But
(23:43):
what if the text is written in such a way
that the characters, the symbols, and the words alone are
the signal. How do you denote shifts in subject matter?
How do you do the things that paragraph breaks do?
And also like where and how does that emerge out
of our written language traditions?
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, and to imagine documents where the signal is really
just the sequence of the characters, like the letters in
the words A great thing to look at is actual
ancient Greek and Roman documents. These things used to often
be written on papyrus scrolls, so remember these would not
be books like ours with flippable pages. The format with
(24:26):
flippable pages like we used today is called a codex.
The scroll is the one continuous sheet, and text on
these scrolls of papyrus was generally written until more like
in the medieval period in a method called scriptio continua,
and this means there is no punctuation between sentences and
(24:47):
there are no spaces between words. No spaces between words.
Is up to you to figure out where one word
stops and another one starts. They don't have punctuation between sentences,
they very likely don't have paragraph breaks, but there might
be something in there to signal some kind of transition
(25:09):
to help you out.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
No, as this was a written language of symbols, what
did we do when we turned to symbols to denote
these shifts? I was initially reading about this in the
Origin of the Pilcrow aka the Strange Paragraph Symbol by
Jimmy Stamp for Smithsonian in twenty thirteen, and Stamp writes
that if we go back to around two hundred CE,
(25:31):
we'd find paragraphs quote unquote, which could loosely be understood
as changes in topics speaker, or stanza that were separated
by various symbols that scribes had developed independently out of
the need for such breaks, but without any kind of
top down consistency. So the scribes here in this part
(25:53):
of Europe might be using one thing. Over here they're
using another thing, just different traditions, different symbols emerging Amprit's quote.
Some used unfamiliar symbols that can't easily be translated into
a typed blog post. Some used something as simple as
a single line, while others used the K for caput
for the Latin word for head. Languages change spellings evolve,
(26:16):
and by the twelfth century scribes abandon the K in
favor of the sea for capitulum little head to divide
text into capitula, also known as chapters. Like the treble clef,
the pill crow evolved due to the inconsistencies inherent in
hand drawing. As it became more widely used, the sea
gained a vertical line in keeping with the latest rubrication
(26:38):
trends and other more elaborate embellishments. Eventually becoming the character
scene at the top of this post. And the character
in question is the pill crow, which you can all
look this up if you're not envisioning it already. It's
this curious, slightly ornate symbol that looks kind of like
a backwards P with a stalk made out of two
(27:00):
vertical lines, and the hollow of the P is often
filled in so that it's solid. Does that Does that
seem like a reasonable description of this strange symbol.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yeah, it's the thing that I remember first seeing when
I was like trying to edit documents in an early
version of Microsoft word and I accidentally clicked some setting
where suddenly every line break had one of these, and
I was like, ah, how do I make them go away? Uh?
But in fact, it used to be quite common for say,
medieval manuscripts to be full of these symbols.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Yeah. Yeah, And indeed, indeed, I think most of the
modern readers are going to be familiar with this from
doing the same thing, clicking on the wrong thing in
a word processor and seeing all the pill crows, seeing
all the little machine ls that are making paragraph breaks possible.
I think there are also some some modern legal and
academic writing uses of the pill crow, but it's you know,
(27:57):
it's used in web publishing, it's used in proofreading, but
it has this origin and just a way to break
up thoughts.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yes, And so strangely enough, the word paragraph though now
the word refers to a chunk of text itself. The
word actually comes from the Greek originally paragraphos, which means
written beside, you know, to write beside something. And that
comes from the fact that originally paragraph breaks come from
(28:28):
this practice of making some kind of mark in the
margin of a document, so you'd have like a Pyraates scroll,
it's just got this big, unbroken chunk of letters just
marching down the page. And the way you signal some
kind of transition. And as you said, Robert, it wasn't consistent.
It wasn't like there were, you know, stable rules for
(28:48):
when you use the paragraphos and when you don't, it
just means something is changing here. Maybe it's a change
a new sentence begins on this line, or maybe it's
that there's a change in speeders in a drama or
a philosophical dialogue or something, or change of topic. It's
just something is different here. And originally that's this line,
(29:09):
just like a dash in the margin, and then over
time it changes into these letters you're talking about, like
the K or the C in Latin manuscripts, and then
eventually the C gets these bars and it becomes the
pill crow. But I think this is all originally derived
from this paragraphs marker, just the dash in the margin.
It says something's different now.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yeah, yeah, this this post I was looking at by Stamp.
He's citing Keith Houston's Shady Characters, The Secret Life of
punctuation symbols and other typographical marks. And it gets into
like the basically the death of the pill Crow. Where
does the pill crow go? And it's actually a pretty
(29:50):
interesting story because basically what ends up happening in the
medieval period is they ring used more and more, but
then they start to sort of vanish in the late
medieval period. And the main reason is that you have
texts being copied. That was how you reproduced texts, as
we've discussed in the show before, and you had these
(30:12):
pill crows which had become increasingly artistic and ornamental in nature.
And when you had things like that in a manuscript
that was being copied, well, somebody else had to come
back in and add those in later. You just had
to leave a space for them. And that's the job
that would fall to the rubricators. They'd be the ones
that come back in and add the read ink or
(30:33):
other special effects that need to be a part of
this illuminated manuscript that's being copied.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
That's actually where their name comes from. Rubric is from
the Latin meaning red, So like the word rubric is
derived from the idea of a heading in a document
that might be written in red. Because of these people,
the rubricators who were using red ink.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Yeah, they fod It sounds kind of nefarious, doesn't it,
the rubricators. I wonder if anyone has used that in
a nefarious fashion and in some sort of strange fiction
before the red letter men. But anyway, Yeah, so you
have all these these these blanks that have to be
left when you're copying manuscripts, and the thing is, as
(31:16):
the work piles up sometimes that the rubrication doesn't get done,
those those spaces remain in the finished text. And then
this carries on apparently when we get to the advent
of the printing press as well. Early printed books were
printed with spaces for hand drawn effects. Such as pill crows.
So you know, you're using the adjustable type face, you're
(31:38):
using the you know, the block letters and all, you're
printing stuff out, but then somebody needs to come back
in and add that pill crow, and sometimes they don't,
And certainly this became the case as demand grew, rubricators
couldn't keep up, and the pill crow dies out, but
the spaces for the pil crow remain. It's almost like
if you go into an old house and they still
(31:58):
have the like the little book for a rotary phone.
Have you been in one of these shows?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Oh yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Yeah. So it's like that technology is obsolete now, but
the space where it went it still remains.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
So what began as a kind of vaguely defined punctuation
mark that would be in the margin beside a column
of text eventually becomes a more sort of inline punctuation mark,
and then eventually just becomes a space in the line,
a line break, and an indentation.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
I just wanted to add one more interesting thing about
the old school paragraphs mark in like a Greek in
Latin manuscripts. This is from that article by Gibson that
I mentioned earlier. So Gibson points out that scholars believe
that in many or most cases, these marks in the
documents cannot be traced back to the original author. Instead,
(32:57):
they are usually something that would be added to a text,
either by a reader or by a scribe or editor
making a copy of a text. Because remember, in the
ancient world there was no printing press. Books had to
be copied by hand. And we can tell that the
paragraphoss marks were probably added at some point after the
original author, because sometimes they appear in different places in
(33:19):
different copies of the same document. And so I think
it's interesting to think about paragraph breaks as being in
a way descended from something that wasn't encoded as a
part of the text at the author's discretion, but at
say a copyist's discretion or at the reader's discretion, they
might make these marks themselves on their own copy of
(33:41):
the document for their own reading convenience. Gibson also talks
about how so for like the cultural descendants of Greek
and Roman rhetoric and composition, the scriptio continuous system, the
one where it's just this block of marching letters that
goes straight down the scroll in a column that came
(34:01):
apart for several reasons. In the medieval period, one thing
that Gibson draws attention to is the switch from the
scroll to the codex. You know, the codex again is
like modern day books, but back then they would have
often been with pages made out of animal skins, and
this change in medium brought about a number of different
ways of thinking about a text and how it's presented
(34:24):
to a reader. There's also Gibson refers to a switch
to what palaeographer MB. Parks calls a quote grammar of
legibility around the eighth and ninth centuries. So it seems
like you got a lot of people with sort of
middling literacy participating in the copying and reading of documents,
(34:46):
like you know, monks and people within the Carol Engine Renaissance. Basically,
they were trying to come up with new ways of
writing that would make texts easier to read, especially if
your language and literacy skill are not top notch, and
so there were a number of legibility innovations in writing.
(35:07):
One example would be the introduction of lower case script,
so you have capital letters in lower case letters to
help organize the words you're looking at. And the other
big one is spaces between words. Thank God. And in
this period, Gibson writes that medieval scribes also continued the
(35:27):
tradition of identifying transitions of one kind or another subsections
within text with that paragraphs marker. And then it's in
this literary tradition that the paragraphs marker goes through all
these you know, morphing into different letters and then eventually
becomes the pilcrow, which then eventually in the technological sphere
(35:48):
of the printing press in some cases and then in
most cases just becomes blank space.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Yeah. And I found it interesting too thinking about this,
like going from from the initial you know, the initial
transformation from from using these hand copyed text to using
the printing press, but still holding on to things like
like hand drawn illustrations, hand drawn pil crows, and so forth.
It made me think about what happens when we do
(36:15):
when we shift to a new technology or a new medium.
I think another example, this is what we've touched on
the show before, is by going increasingly going to PDFs
and an electronic texts essentially that's more in line with
the scroll. There doesn't need to be a page break
page to page, and I think, you know, viewing wise,
you don't have to have one if you don't want one.
(36:37):
But I know, for my part, I want those those
page breaks in there, like something feels weird organizationally weird,
even on electronic texts, which I use all the time,
especially for work. But I feel like there needs I
need to feel like I'm looking at a digital version
of a physical page in a physical book rather than
the sort of endless stream that it actually is.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Well, yeah, and sometimes you would have to wonder, like,
is it actually arbitrary which elements of composition, which like
structural elements of composition, are preserved across different media, and
which are not. So when you read an ebook, they
almost always are going to keep the author's original paragraph breaks, right.
(37:22):
It's not going to rearrange what's a paragraph or make
shorter paragraphs or something. But the original page breaks are
of no concern at all. In fact, probably even you know,
the original printing of that book may have had different
page breaks than whatever form the author composed it in,
whether on a typewriter or handwritten or whatever. And so
we've just decided that, well, the page needs to look
(37:43):
the same in terms of where the paragraphs are broken,
but not it does not need to look the same
in terms of where the pages are broken, and I
see no reason why, like it would have to be
that way, you know.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
But even that, I have to admit, seems a little
wrong at times, Like I don't know if this is
everyone else's experience, but when I'm reading books on my kindle,
I'll skip to the next page and sometimes I'll come back,
or I'll know i'll accidentally turn the page and I'll
turn back, and I'll notice that now the page break
occurs at a different spot in the text, and that
feels really wrong to me, and I feel even though
(38:14):
there's no I don't think there's any way you could
have that uniform, especially when you have the luxury of
being able to change the size of the fond on
the screen and so forth. But it feels weird that
I shouldn't have internal consistency regarding when a page ends
and when it begins.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
Yeah, totally. I mean, I think we have expectations established
on the basis of physical printed books where you know
that just doesn't change, right.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
I'm not saying it messes me up or really pisses
me off or anything, but it's just something I casually
notice as I'm reading. It's like, what now the page
ends on this paragraph?
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Well, this also makes me think about something Gibson mentions
in this essay, which is he writes, quote, Medieval readers
and writers were thus increasingly attentive to the visual appearance
of the page, and as a result recognize the paragraph
significant place within it. So it's sort of in the
medieval period that the paragraph becomes an important part of reading.
(39:12):
And I was thinking about this. You know, I have
a layperson's perspective on this, so I don't know if
this is a good insight, but I was at least wondering. Okay,
So you look at like medieval practices of producing highly
decorated texts with you know, beautiful lettering and calligraphy, illustrations
and illuminations and so forth, it seems to me you
find a lot less of that in earlier texts. You Like,
(39:35):
if you look at copies of the same books from
centuries earlier, for example the Bible, the earlier copies there
often seems to be no attempt whatsoever to improve the
esthetic qualities of the copy. It's more like the scroll
is just a purely utilitarian storage medium for the text
of the book. So that it, you know, wouldn't be
(39:55):
otherwise lost or forgotten, and it would probably often be
used for being read al loud. Then you again, take
the same text and look at a medieval manuscript, it
might be gorgeous in some way. So it seems possible
that the modern concept of the paragraph emerges from a
time of more literary luxury, when there's a greater emphasis
on making manuscripts themselves esthetically pleasing. All right, Rob and
(40:21):
I were just talking off Mike and we decided we
have to admit defeat. By time, we had more to
talk about, we didn't get to it yet, So this
is going to become a two part episode.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Yeah, maybe it'll give me time to find that actual
perfect paragraph from some book I love. I'll look around,
maybe something will pop out at me. All Right, we'll
join us next time as we continue this discussion, But
go ahead and write in. We'd love to hear from
you if you have thoughts about the paragraph as we've
discussed it thus far. Core episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind published Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to
Blow your Mind podcast feed. We are primarily a science podcast,
(40:54):
and those are the primarily science episodes. On Mondays we
do a listener mail, on windy Days we do a
short form artifact or monster fact, and on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, we had a day
off this week, so we are bringing you an episode
from the vault, and this is part one of our
series on the paragraph. Yes, the literary device, the chunk
of text. What is the paragraph? Where does it come from?
How does it work? This episode originally published on August
twenty third, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
All right, let's jump right in.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And in today's episode, I
wanted to take a look at a writing convention and
that is the paragraph or the paragraph break. I think
there was a single moment of genesis in my desire
to do this episode, and it's that, you know, some
number of weeks back, I was doing research for some
(01:10):
episode and I ended up looking up an archived plain
text version of an old book.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Rob.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I'm sure you've had this issue on the show before.
So you get plain text and the text is there,
but all the original parag breaks are messed up. Like
they're either in the wrong place or there are no breaks,
and I was like trying to read it. I was
just like, this is horrible. I hate this. Even though
the whole text is here, I'm basically incapable of reading it. Somehow,
(01:41):
the existence of paragraphs with reasonable breaks is what makes
a massive text physically consumable to.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Me, right, and certainly, if it is supposed to be paragraphs,
it's supposed to have paragraph breaks in it. It's like
if someone were to bring a seven course meal to
you and say, here, here it is in stew form,
please enjoy it. I mean, and it hasn't been blended
up in this scenario at all. So it's not like
it is garbled. All of it is still there, but
(02:11):
here it is without the little breaks. Here it is
just all, you know, either either in the same pot
or even just mashed together on the same plate. No, no, no,
I want these. We need these breaks between these different
things that we're going to consume. There needs to be
an order to what is occurring.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Right, Why not just put the tira massou in the
clam chowder and then you get it all at once. Yeah,
And so this got me thinking about paragraphs in general,
and wondering about where they come from historically, and why
we build them the way that we do, if there
even is a consistent way that we build them, and
all kinds of questions like this, And one thing I
(02:48):
thought might be interesting to get us kicked off today
is to just talk about the literary effect, the effect
on the reader when you're reading a book with a
lot of long paragraph versus short paragraphs, Like how does
that change the experience of reading and the impression created.
I'm sure other people have different ways of answering this,
(03:10):
but one immediate distinction I thought of in my own
reading experience has to do with the feeling of substance
versus the feeling of momentum, and I would explain it
like this. When I think about good books with very
short paragraphs, I tend to think about readability and hookiness.
Like Airport thriller novels. They tend to have very short paragraphs,
(03:33):
and those short paragraphs are I think effective for what
they're meant to do. That they tend to make the
text easy to read. They make it feel like it's
fast moving and inviting. It wants to keep you reading,
making you less likely to put the book down. Meanwhile,
when I think about good books with very long paragraphs,
I tend to think about literary richness, like obsessive observation
(03:58):
or description or insight texts that feel like they are
packed with detail and texture and thoughtfulness. So, in trying
to like balance out those two different advantages you get
from different paragraph lengths, I came up with a kind
of perhaps silly metaphor, but I started thinking about trips
to bring groceries in from the car. You know, you
(04:19):
ever go out shopping, you have a bunch of different things,
and you can, you know, you can take one or
two bags each time, or you can try to do
everything in one go, but sometimes that's impossible and you
have to stop halfway to the door. So like when
your paragraphs are too short, it's almost like you're trying
to bring the groceries in one item at a time.
Something just starts to feel kind of insubstantial and absurd
(04:41):
about what you're doing. But if paragraphs are too long,
that's kind of like trying to bring everything in in
one trip, and you just stop, like you have to
put it down and decide, okay, I can't do this,
So you're kind of balancing mobility, the mobility of carrying
less with the substance of carrying more.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
I think that's a good that's an interesting life thinking
about it that certainly, because the other side of that
is I'm instantly thinking of the person that is obscenely
trying to carry all the groceries in in one go,
like you know, and I think I've tried to do
this before, where you're just you have multiple grocery bag
straps on each hand, you have something on your arm,
(05:21):
a sort of cradling something. Yeah, and then yeah, I
guess you're planning on opening the door with your foot
or just slamming into it, or hoping there's somebody on
the other side to help you in. And here's the thing,
as the reader, like I'm either the door or I'm
the person on the other side of the scenario, and
you just want to be like calmed down a little bit,
like I bought the book, or I rented the book,
(05:43):
or I borrowed the book from the library, whatever the
case may be. We can get to all this. We
don't have to have it all in the first paragraph.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Right, And this is not I think this is not
unique to modern readers. I mean, people who are writing
handbooks of composition and rhetoric in centuries past warned that
overly long paragraphs have the effect of quote over taxing
the reader. There's something about unbroken blocks of text that
just gets tiresome. And somehow, even though the text continues
(06:13):
either way, just putting more breaks in between, separating that
in the smaller chunks, smaller paragraphs somehow makes the text
feel lighter and like you're just sort of like skipping
over it at at a breezy pace, as opposed to
getting bogged down and feeling this weight.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
I was looking around for different writings on paragraphs and
I actually came across a nineteen sixty eight paper titled
writing Paragraphs by Culkin at All and it is J. R.
Tolkien himself, and wow, weird weirdly enough, one of the
co authors was a professor at Memphis State in Tennessee.
I didn't get to the bottom of how these individuals
(06:50):
all came together being credited on the same paper, but
it gets into some of the basics and challenges and
goals of teaching effective writing. But even in this paper,
the authors point out that the unity of a given
paragraph is often illusory, a longer paragraph, they point out,
can often be broken into without upsetting anything. And they
(07:11):
point out, for instance, this is often done at certainly
at the editing phase and newspapers. The author wrote a
paragraph it's a little bit too long looking on the screen,
you just chop that sucker in half, and a lot
of times you can do that without any ill effect.
And likewise they point out that the reverse is true.
In many cases. You can take shorter paragraphs and kind
of combine them together and you're not going to effectively
(07:32):
break anything. So that's I think that's something interesting to
keep in mind, even though at the same time they
are acknowledging that, yeah, a lot of paragraph writing is
about Okay, here's your this is the stuff we all
learn in school, right here is our topic sentence. Then
we have supporting sentences, and the paragraph is supposed to
be this one concise nugget of thought for us to consume.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Well, that's a great transition to the next thing I
wanted to get at, which is that you know, of
course we're talking about reporting our subjective feelings as a
reader on you know, reading paragraphs of different lengths. But
the other side of the approach to paragraphs is the
more prescriptive approach. You know, here's what a paragraph must do,
with the most famous or if you like, infamous prescription
(08:18):
being that a paragraph must develop a single idea, and
that idea must be announced near the beginning of the
paragraph in a topic sentence, and then there must be
supporting sentences. And you know, we can talk more about
the prescriptive idea of the paragraph later, I guess. But anyway,
I find it interesting to consider the surface level paradox
(08:38):
that paragraphs are absolutely essential to most modern readers. I
think you and I are probably not unique in this.
Like the prospect of reading a book or even a
long article that's just a single, unbroken block of text
makes my blood run cold. I could not do it.
And yet it is difficult to explain exactly what the
(08:59):
rule rules are for creating paragraphs like they're essential. But
attempts to codify them in a universal way, I would argue,
and I think we will argue later on pretty much
universally failures, at at least at describing the way paragraphs
are actually used in popular writing. You know, so, questions
(09:20):
about where do we break the line and why are
in some ways still kind of elusive, even though breaking
the line is a must.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Now, I don't know how successful this will be, but
I did at least think, is it possible to mention
favorite paragraph breaks in writing? I was struggling to have
any like obviously I have a lot of bits of
writing that are a paragraph, but I was struggling to
think of examples where the break of the paragraph is
what I admire in the writing, as essential as it
(09:51):
is to a piece of writing as a whole.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Yeah, I was once you brought this up. I was
thinking on it on my own here, and I was thinking, well, okay,
what are bits that stand out to me in writing?
And I found that a lot of times the things
that come to me the easiest are opening lines or
sometimes closing lines from novels, and a lot of those
a lot of the time, if not all the time.
It's super short. It's often not even perhaps a true
(10:16):
clinical paragraph in that it is actually just one line.
And like a couple of examples that I instantly thought of,
Dante's Inferno has a great one in the of course
we're getting into poetry here, we're getting into stanzas, but
it is effectively a sentence in the middle of the
journey of our life. I came to myself in a
dark wood for the straightway was lost. An even better example,
(10:39):
and this is from an actual novel. This is from
Alan Rogue Grills The Voyeur. It just begins with a
short sentence it was as if no one had heard.
And I always loved that one because it's so evocative,
like what is the thing that no one had heard?
Why had they not heard it? And who is making
or what is making the sound? Like it asked so
(11:00):
many questions that I have to keep moving. Another good
one Fahrenheit four fifty one by Ray Bradberry. It was
a pleasure to burn.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Oh that's interesting. So these prose works. I've read these,
but I did not recall the opening paragraphs being a
single line.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah. A couple of other ones that came to mind.
Neurom Anser by William Gibson. The sky above the port
was the color of television turned to a dead channel
or this is a famous one as well. From Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. We
were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert
when the drugs began to take hold, Yeah, that's another
(11:37):
good one.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
So you're a fan of the short, possibly single sentence
opening paragraph in fiction at least.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Yeah, Yeah, there's something about just like that one line
that's really there. Really either either it really makes me
think and established as kind of a vibe, or in
some cases it establishes a different definite setting or scenario
rather succinctly. For instance, the Gibson one a certain it's
really more about vibe. The Voyeur quote is more about vibe.
(12:05):
The Hunter S. Thompson one is vibe and setting. It
gives you a sense of where we're going and sort
of what is going on. I was obviously I'm a
big fan of Dune, so I thought, well, what was
the first line of doing I can't remember it off
the top of my head. There, if you skip past
the quote from the Princess, the first line is in
the week before their departure to Aracus, when all the
(12:26):
final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an
old crone came to visit the mother of the boy Paul.
Now that's that's not a paragraph that I would just say,
oh I put that on a T shirt for me,
or or can I have that inscribed in my flesh.
But it is a great, a great opening line that
just establishes exactly what is going on and gives you,
(12:48):
you know, it gives you some mystery. I guess you
don't know what Aracus is at this point, and you
were instantly wondering, well, who is this old crone? And
it sets the story and it does a good job
of just just having us dived directly into the action. Really,
but I couldn't remember or just looking around really quickly
find an example of a multi sentence paragraph, particularly an
(13:11):
opening paragraph from a work that I held to a
really high standard. I don't know how about you, Joe.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
I'm sure if I had more time thinking about this,
I could come up with good examples, but I have not,
because again, I think paragraph breaks are essential, but I
have not scrutinized individual breaks enough that they really like
stick with me, there's something that is essential, but they
mostly to me, become invisible in a text. I don't
remember where the line breaks happen.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Usually, Yeah, if a paragraph is put together effectively and
it's doing its job, you don't notice. That's one of
the things about it. I've never had the experience of
reading something to think, yeah, that's a great place for
a paragraph break, I might think the other the opposite
of that, I might think, couldn't we have broken this
up a little bit more Frank Herbert or whoever I'm
(14:01):
happening to read, And it's not necessarily I was thinking
about this as well, like, what is the experience of
reading a text that is not just one big breakless
paragraph but has, but does have some rather expansive paragraphs.
I find that sometimes when I'm looking at this page,
I still have a gut instinct that it looks like work,
(14:22):
Like you know what I'm saying, Like, even though the
thing is, if it's a book that I'm even halfway
interested in, it's not like big paragraphs are a stumbling
block to me. It's not like I get lost in
them or I'm not going to finish them. It's not
like I need to, you know, artificially throw in paragraph breaks.
From my own reading, it works just fine. But there's
something maybe it's like a callback to early reading experiences,
(14:45):
but there's sort of that initial impact in my psyche
where it's like, oh, these paragraphs are too long, what
is this author doing? Oh?
Speaker 2 (14:52):
This is funny though, because inserting your own paragraph breaks
in the work of an author who otherwise creates really
unholy chunks. This is something that some teachers actually do,
and one specific writer I was reading for this episode
talks about doing so. One of the main things I
was reading in preparation for this was a great essay
(15:14):
by a scholar named Richard Hughes Gibson called Past Lives
of the Paragraph which was published in the Hedgehog Review.
That's an interdisciplinary culture journal based out of the University
of Virginia. And I'll refer back to this article several
times in the episode, but towards the end of his article,
Gibson tells a story about how several years back he
(15:36):
was trying to prepare a reading for students, and this
was by a critic who, well, i'll just hear read
from what Gibson writes. Quote said critic had a pensioned
for composing labyrinthine paragraphs, which I now realized would quickly
exhaust my students. Although I felt a tinge of compunction
about tampering with those paragraphs, I set to work and,
(15:59):
knowing this was the only way of salvaging the reading,
the breaks came easily, though, and I soon found the
work enjoyable. I was seeing the piece in a new way,
and I quote discovered several remarkable sentences that I had
overlooked while navigating my way through the labyrinths. And then
he also says that this did indeed make this article
(16:19):
much more enjoyable for the students, and he just started
doing it in all his other classes. When somebody has
huge paragraphs, he would just go in and edit them
to add in paragraph breaks, and you could see. I
don't know, an author might be mad to find out
somebody was doing that to their work, but you can
also clearly see the advantage.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Yeah. Yeah, It does make me wonder if there are
new editions of books that come out that engage in this,
or is it considered forbidden? You know, I don't know.
I'd be very curious to hear about this. When I
was looking around for some other info about this, I
did run across a paper titled how to write a
(16:58):
thesis according to to Echo by unburd to Echo, And
in it, he briefly touches on the paragraph and he
writes the following quote begin new paragraphs. Often do so
when logically necessary and when the pace of the text
requires it. But the more you do it, the better.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
That's funny because Echo has a tendency to write some
really long paragraphs. But I mean, in his defense, a
lot of his long paragraphs are full of exactly that
quality of richness that I was mentioning earlier, Like the
long paragraphs feel substantial, They're full of detail and insight.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah. This, of course, I was thinking about other authors
that I've really loved over the years, and I started
thinking about Cormick McCarthy, of course, who is often very succinct,
especially in his later works, or really most of his
works passed like the first novel its name leaves me
at the moment, but his first novel is a little
bit denser. But a lot of his later work, especially
(17:57):
his more recent work, is often characterized by being just,
you know, very succinct, short sentences, no quotation marks. But
occasionally you get a nice, like super run on long
sentence that is essentially like a big paragraph that is
almost the opposite of what we're talking about here, where
it just keeps going and going, but at the same
(18:17):
time it has a rhythm to it and an intensity,
and the mere fact that it won't end. Is like
it's like a crazed thought being poured directly into your
brain and you can't quite turn it off.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah, long paragraphs can definitely lend themselves to a kind
of obsessive, immersive or stream of consciousness quality to the text.
It's you know, when you are like stuck deep in
somebody else's brain and you're not coming up for air,
that that's often going to be a long paragraph.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's almost like there's a conversational
aspect to paragraph breaks, like this is the amount of
text that is occurring before the speaker pauses, has a
sip of their beverage, gives you an opportunity to think
or say something in return. But it's just that paragraph.
Then perhaps you're being preached at I was thinking of.
(19:12):
I also was thinking, Okay, obviously, paragraph breaks. I think
we all agree that these are great. But surely there's
somebody out there who's gotten a bit experimental and decided
I will craft a work of fiction that has no
paragraph breaks. And I don't remember ever encountering anything like this.
I've certainly read books that, for instance, don't have quotation
(19:32):
marks for dialogue or I think I've read books that
don't have indentions on new paragraphs. I'm trying to remember
what this would have been. I think it was an
Anthony Burgess book, but I don't recall. I've certainly read
books where you have, you know, large sections written in
fictional slang, etc. But I've never encountered anything that is
one massive chunk of text. I looked around to see
(19:55):
if such a thing existed, and I did find some
threads on like a creative writing board message board where
someone was like, Hey, I'm thinking of writing something with
no paragraph breaks. What does everyone think? And there were
some great answers, you know, people were like, well, I
think it's gonna be hard for folks to digest. I
think it's gonna you know, they're gonna potentially recoil from
(20:16):
seeing that big, massive block of text. And so it
was interesting because, yeah, there's so many things you can
you can break and play with as a writer potentially,
and more so if you know what you're doing. But
when it comes to the paragraph break, it does seem
like there is something from the modern standpoint anyway, that
is essential about it.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yes, and I think this will make a great transition
to talking a bit about the history of the paragraph,
where paragraphs come from, because if you go back far
enough in history, you're going to find a lot of
literature that is made entirely with that block of text mentality. Man,
you hate big, blocky masses of text. Look at like
(20:57):
an ancient Greek manuscript and just feel the chill.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, that's and I was. I was looking at some
of these examples, and and so I couldn't help but
think a lot about the medium involved too. So, like
if you go back and look at super old examples
of writing that have survived, you're looking at things like
oracle bones, which you know, oftentimes you're dealing with with
like say the bones from a turtle, part of the shell,
(21:21):
that sort of thing with inscriptions on it, or you're
dealing with with like wooden strips. You see that sometimes
from from from from from from you know, Indian traditions.
There's also, of course, the use of clay tablets, and
a lot of times you're you you probably have to realize, okay,
this is this was relatively expensive and it consumed a
(21:43):
lot of time and energy. So you would want to
fit as much text on one of those as possible,
and at the same time, there's only so much text
you could get on there, you know, like how many
thoughts could you effectively encode into an oracle bone? And
even if you're in even of what you're putting down
is certainly maybe not a diary entry, but it's more
(22:03):
about just recording figures and facts and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Well, I do think a lot of the conventions of
writing might be contingent on the differences between a document
scarcity culture and a document rich culture, which I think
we you know, sort of came up when we were
talking about the history of technologies for duplicating documents. That
you know, people just have different ways of approaching writing
(22:29):
when written documents are something that is expensive and scarce
versus when they're just you know, cheap to make and
all over the place.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah. So yeah, from our modern standpoint, I was trying
to think of what is my relationship with paragraph breaks,
and I tend to think of it as kind of
like the breath of the text. You know, it's the
fluctuating intensity of the author's mental process. And I also
feel that, you know, with a very visual mind and
one hone for fiction reading by film viewing to a
(22:59):
large degree, I think, you know, like I was viewing
films and viewing TV before I was reading, and so
to a certain extent, the paragraph breaks are also sort
of like stage direction, like look at this, now, look
at this, and they can help drive home shifts in tone,
intensity and character and so forth. So it's, you know,
from our modern standpoint, the format is part of the signal.
(23:22):
Strip the format away, and the signal is degraded, like
that big block of text. If you take any given work,
you know, you take up it. Certainly, if you take
something like any of the books that we've discussed so far,
and you take all the paragraph breaks out, it's not
going to be the same because it's like the breath
patterns of the voice speaking to you are altered. But
(23:43):
what if the text is written in such a way
that the characters, the symbols, and the words alone are
the signal. How do you denote shifts in subject matter?
How do you do the things that paragraph breaks do?
And also like where and how does that emerge out
of our written language traditions?
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, and to imagine documents where the signal is really
just the sequence of the characters, like the letters in
the words A great thing to look at is actual
ancient Greek and Roman documents. These things used to often
be written on papyrus scrolls, so remember these would not
be books like ours with flippable pages. The format with
(24:26):
flippable pages like we used today is called a codex.
The scroll is the one continuous sheet, and text on
these scrolls of papyrus was generally written until more like
in the medieval period in a method called scriptio continua,
and this means there is no punctuation between sentences and
(24:47):
there are no spaces between words. No spaces between words.
Is up to you to figure out where one word
stops and another one starts. They don't have punctuation between sentences,
they very likely don't have paragraph breaks, but there might
be something in there to signal some kind of transition
(25:09):
to help you out.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
No, as this was a written language of symbols, what
did we do when we turned to symbols to denote
these shifts? I was initially reading about this in the
Origin of the Pilcrow aka the Strange Paragraph Symbol by
Jimmy Stamp for Smithsonian in twenty thirteen, and Stamp writes
that if we go back to around two hundred CE,
(25:31):
we'd find paragraphs quote unquote, which could loosely be understood
as changes in topics speaker, or stanza that were separated
by various symbols that scribes had developed independently out of
the need for such breaks, but without any kind of
top down consistency. So the scribes here in this part
(25:53):
of Europe might be using one thing. Over here they're
using another thing, just different traditions, different symbols emerging Amprit's quote.
Some used unfamiliar symbols that can't easily be translated into
a typed blog post. Some used something as simple as
a single line, while others used the K for caput
for the Latin word for head. Languages change spellings evolve,
(26:16):
and by the twelfth century scribes abandon the K in
favor of the sea for capitulum little head to divide
text into capitula, also known as chapters. Like the treble clef,
the pill crow evolved due to the inconsistencies inherent in
hand drawing. As it became more widely used, the sea
gained a vertical line in keeping with the latest rubrication
(26:38):
trends and other more elaborate embellishments. Eventually becoming the character
scene at the top of this post. And the character
in question is the pill crow, which you can all
look this up if you're not envisioning it already. It's
this curious, slightly ornate symbol that looks kind of like
a backwards P with a stalk made out of two
(27:00):
vertical lines, and the hollow of the P is often
filled in so that it's solid. Does that Does that
seem like a reasonable description of this strange symbol.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yeah, it's the thing that I remember first seeing when
I was like trying to edit documents in an early
version of Microsoft word and I accidentally clicked some setting
where suddenly every line break had one of these, and
I was like, ah, how do I make them go away? Uh?
But in fact, it used to be quite common for say,
medieval manuscripts to be full of these symbols.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Yeah. Yeah, And indeed, indeed, I think most of the
modern readers are going to be familiar with this from
doing the same thing, clicking on the wrong thing in
a word processor and seeing all the pill crows, seeing
all the little machine ls that are making paragraph breaks possible.
I think there are also some some modern legal and
academic writing uses of the pill crow, but it's you know,
(27:57):
it's used in web publishing, it's used in proofreading, but
it has this origin and just a way to break
up thoughts.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yes, And so strangely enough, the word paragraph though now
the word refers to a chunk of text itself. The
word actually comes from the Greek originally paragraphos, which means
written beside, you know, to write beside something. And that
comes from the fact that originally paragraph breaks come from
(28:28):
this practice of making some kind of mark in the
margin of a document, so you'd have like a Pyraates scroll,
it's just got this big, unbroken chunk of letters just
marching down the page. And the way you signal some
kind of transition. And as you said, Robert, it wasn't consistent.
It wasn't like there were, you know, stable rules for
(28:48):
when you use the paragraphos and when you don't, it
just means something is changing here. Maybe it's a change
a new sentence begins on this line, or maybe it's
that there's a change in speeders in a drama or
a philosophical dialogue or something, or change of topic. It's
just something is different here. And originally that's this line,
(29:09):
just like a dash in the margin, and then over
time it changes into these letters you're talking about, like
the K or the C in Latin manuscripts, and then
eventually the C gets these bars and it becomes the
pill crow. But I think this is all originally derived
from this paragraphs marker, just the dash in the margin.
It says something's different now.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yeah, yeah, this this post I was looking at by Stamp.
He's citing Keith Houston's Shady Characters, The Secret Life of
punctuation symbols and other typographical marks. And it gets into
like the basically the death of the pill Crow. Where
does the pill crow go? And it's actually a pretty
(29:50):
interesting story because basically what ends up happening in the
medieval period is they ring used more and more, but
then they start to sort of vanish in the late
medieval period. And the main reason is that you have
texts being copied. That was how you reproduced texts, as
we've discussed in the show before, and you had these
(30:12):
pill crows which had become increasingly artistic and ornamental in nature.
And when you had things like that in a manuscript
that was being copied, well, somebody else had to come
back in and add those in later. You just had
to leave a space for them. And that's the job
that would fall to the rubricators. They'd be the ones
that come back in and add the read ink or
(30:33):
other special effects that need to be a part of
this illuminated manuscript that's being copied.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
That's actually where their name comes from. Rubric is from
the Latin meaning red, So like the word rubric is
derived from the idea of a heading in a document
that might be written in red. Because of these people,
the rubricators who were using red ink.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Yeah, they fod It sounds kind of nefarious, doesn't it,
the rubricators. I wonder if anyone has used that in
a nefarious fashion and in some sort of strange fiction
before the red letter men. But anyway, Yeah, so you
have all these these these blanks that have to be
left when you're copying manuscripts, and the thing is, as
(31:16):
the work piles up sometimes that the rubrication doesn't get done,
those those spaces remain in the finished text. And then
this carries on apparently when we get to the advent
of the printing press as well. Early printed books were
printed with spaces for hand drawn effects. Such as pill crows.
So you know, you're using the adjustable type face, you're
(31:38):
using the you know, the block letters and all, you're
printing stuff out, but then somebody needs to come back
in and add that pill crow, and sometimes they don't,
And certainly this became the case as demand grew, rubricators
couldn't keep up, and the pill crow dies out, but
the spaces for the pil crow remain. It's almost like
if you go into an old house and they still
(31:58):
have the like the little book for a rotary phone.
Have you been in one of these shows?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Oh yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Yeah. So it's like that technology is obsolete now, but
the space where it went it still remains.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
So what began as a kind of vaguely defined punctuation
mark that would be in the margin beside a column
of text eventually becomes a more sort of inline punctuation mark,
and then eventually just becomes a space in the line,
a line break, and an indentation.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
I just wanted to add one more interesting thing about
the old school paragraphs mark in like a Greek in
Latin manuscripts. This is from that article by Gibson that
I mentioned earlier. So Gibson points out that scholars believe
that in many or most cases, these marks in the
documents cannot be traced back to the original author. Instead,
(32:57):
they are usually something that would be added to a text,
either by a reader or by a scribe or editor
making a copy of a text. Because remember, in the
ancient world there was no printing press. Books had to
be copied by hand. And we can tell that the
paragraphoss marks were probably added at some point after the
original author, because sometimes they appear in different places in
(33:19):
different copies of the same document. And so I think
it's interesting to think about paragraph breaks as being in
a way descended from something that wasn't encoded as a
part of the text at the author's discretion, but at
say a copyist's discretion or at the reader's discretion, they
might make these marks themselves on their own copy of
(33:41):
the document for their own reading convenience. Gibson also talks
about how so for like the cultural descendants of Greek
and Roman rhetoric and composition, the scriptio continuous system, the
one where it's just this block of marching letters that
goes straight down the scroll in a column that came
(34:01):
apart for several reasons. In the medieval period, one thing
that Gibson draws attention to is the switch from the
scroll to the codex. You know, the codex again is
like modern day books, but back then they would have
often been with pages made out of animal skins, and
this change in medium brought about a number of different
ways of thinking about a text and how it's presented
(34:24):
to a reader. There's also Gibson refers to a switch
to what palaeographer MB. Parks calls a quote grammar of
legibility around the eighth and ninth centuries. So it seems
like you got a lot of people with sort of
middling literacy participating in the copying and reading of documents,
(34:46):
like you know, monks and people within the Carol Engine Renaissance. Basically,
they were trying to come up with new ways of
writing that would make texts easier to read, especially if
your language and literacy skill are not top notch, and
so there were a number of legibility innovations in writing.
(35:07):
One example would be the introduction of lower case script,
so you have capital letters in lower case letters to
help organize the words you're looking at. And the other
big one is spaces between words. Thank God. And in
this period, Gibson writes that medieval scribes also continued the
(35:27):
tradition of identifying transitions of one kind or another subsections
within text with that paragraphs marker. And then it's in
this literary tradition that the paragraphs marker goes through all
these you know, morphing into different letters and then eventually
becomes the pilcrow, which then eventually in the technological sphere
(35:48):
of the printing press in some cases and then in
most cases just becomes blank space.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Yeah. And I found it interesting too thinking about this,
like going from from the initial you know, the initial
transformation from from using these hand copyed text to using
the printing press, but still holding on to things like
like hand drawn illustrations, hand drawn pil crows, and so forth.
It made me think about what happens when we do
(36:15):
when we shift to a new technology or a new medium.
I think another example, this is what we've touched on
the show before, is by going increasingly going to PDFs
and an electronic texts essentially that's more in line with
the scroll. There doesn't need to be a page break
page to page, and I think, you know, viewing wise,
you don't have to have one if you don't want one.
(36:37):
But I know, for my part, I want those those
page breaks in there, like something feels weird organizationally weird,
even on electronic texts, which I use all the time,
especially for work. But I feel like there needs I
need to feel like I'm looking at a digital version
of a physical page in a physical book rather than
the sort of endless stream that it actually is.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Well, yeah, and sometimes you would have to wonder, like,
is it actually arbitrary which elements of composition, which like
structural elements of composition, are preserved across different media, and
which are not. So when you read an ebook, they
almost always are going to keep the author's original paragraph breaks, right.
(37:22):
It's not going to rearrange what's a paragraph or make
shorter paragraphs or something. But the original page breaks are
of no concern at all. In fact, probably even you know,
the original printing of that book may have had different
page breaks than whatever form the author composed it in,
whether on a typewriter or handwritten or whatever. And so
we've just decided that, well, the page needs to look
(37:43):
the same in terms of where the paragraphs are broken,
but not it does not need to look the same
in terms of where the pages are broken, and I
see no reason why, like it would have to be
that way, you know.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
But even that, I have to admit, seems a little
wrong at times, Like I don't know if this is
everyone else's experience, but when I'm reading books on my kindle,
I'll skip to the next page and sometimes I'll come back,
or I'll know i'll accidentally turn the page and I'll
turn back, and I'll notice that now the page break
occurs at a different spot in the text, and that
feels really wrong to me, and I feel even though
(38:14):
there's no I don't think there's any way you could
have that uniform, especially when you have the luxury of
being able to change the size of the fond on
the screen and so forth. But it feels weird that
I shouldn't have internal consistency regarding when a page ends
and when it begins.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
Yeah, totally. I mean, I think we have expectations established
on the basis of physical printed books where you know
that just doesn't change, right.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
I'm not saying it messes me up or really pisses
me off or anything, but it's just something I casually
notice as I'm reading. It's like, what now the page
ends on this paragraph?
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Well, this also makes me think about something Gibson mentions
in this essay, which is he writes, quote, Medieval readers
and writers were thus increasingly attentive to the visual appearance
of the page, and as a result recognize the paragraph
significant place within it. So it's sort of in the
medieval period that the paragraph becomes an important part of reading.
(39:12):
And I was thinking about this. You know, I have
a layperson's perspective on this, so I don't know if
this is a good insight, but I was at least wondering. Okay,
So you look at like medieval practices of producing highly
decorated texts with you know, beautiful lettering and calligraphy, illustrations
and illuminations and so forth, it seems to me you
find a lot less of that in earlier texts. You Like,
(39:35):
if you look at copies of the same books from
centuries earlier, for example the Bible, the earlier copies there
often seems to be no attempt whatsoever to improve the
esthetic qualities of the copy. It's more like the scroll
is just a purely utilitarian storage medium for the text
of the book. So that it, you know, wouldn't be
(39:55):
otherwise lost or forgotten, and it would probably often be
used for being read al loud. Then you again, take
the same text and look at a medieval manuscript, it
might be gorgeous in some way. So it seems possible
that the modern concept of the paragraph emerges from a
time of more literary luxury, when there's a greater emphasis
on making manuscripts themselves esthetically pleasing. All right, Rob and
(40:21):
I were just talking off Mike and we decided we
have to admit defeat. By time, we had more to
talk about, we didn't get to it yet, So this
is going to become a two part episode.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Yeah, maybe it'll give me time to find that actual
perfect paragraph from some book I love. I'll look around,
maybe something will pop out at me. All Right, we'll
join us next time as we continue this discussion, But
go ahead and write in. We'd love to hear from
you if you have thoughts about the paragraph as we've
discussed it thus far. Core episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind published Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to
Blow your Mind podcast feed. We are primarily a science podcast,
(40:54):
and those are the primarily science episodes. On Mondays we
do a listener mail, on windy Days we do a
short form artifact or monster fact, and on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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