How do you decide when to begin a new paragraph? It always seems so natural and inevitable a decision, yet is difficult to verbalize the rationale behind it. Is it more about form, or meaning? Is it related to the limits of working memory? I’m getting ready for it…
Ok here’s the new paragraph! Any thoughts? 
It’s a matter of style.
Journalistic writing makes use of short paragraphs, usually of one to three sentences long. Its principal purpose is to break up text visually in order to offer relief to the eyes.
Generally, if a sentence is a complete thought, a paragraph is a complete topic or, at least, a complete idea. This allows for things like single-sentence paragraphs, even single-word paragraphs if the word makes sense as a sentence.
Where to divide precisely is one of those purely stylistic questions that defies a cookbook answer. Each author makes their own arrangements; learning how to do it yourself is one reason to read a variety of authors with their own idiosyncratic styles.
There is (at least) rule beyond this: Dialogue generally gives each speaker a new paragraph whenever they begin talking. This helps the reader to separate the individual voices; it also reduces the need for the narrator to explicitly name the speaker every time.
Since this is about the craft of writing, it’s better suited to Cafe Society than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
In writing or transcribing dialogue, a change of speaker is (almost) always a new paragraph.*
That’s the only absolute rule – otherwise, it’s a matter of stylistic preference, marking a change, major or subtle, in thought. For example, I started this paragraph to go into detail about stylistics after setting the one standard usage ‘rule’ in its own paragraph.
Because I’m showing a change of thought here in this paragraph, and the previous paragraph was getting slightly long, I chose to make a discretionary break here for improved readability. This paragraph could have been a continuation of the previous one, but I opted to put in a break because unless I’m explaining something complex, I prefer shorter paragraphs.
“Does everyone understand?” asked the teacher.
“Yeah,” Keith said, echoed by “Uh-huh” from Brandon, “I get it” from Paul, and general agreement from the others.
I’m primarily a poet, so sometimes, I use very short paragraphs for emphasis.
Very short.
Tiny.
But sometimes I use long, winding paragraphs. I use paragraphs full of flowery prose, describing every minute detail in overt and verbose language. I’ll go on and on and on with graphic adjectives and useless adverbs.
Okay, so not. I hate useless adverbs. And flowery adjectives. And pretty much everything I mentioned in that last paragraph.
So… short. But I don’t mind Robert Penn Warren style page long paragraphs when used appropriately.
I’m quite impressed by the self-referencing responses!
What if we didn’t have the entities known as ‘paragraphs’?
The form of this response kind of resembles a to-do list.
Pretend that you’re not allowed to form your thoughts beyond short single sentences.
I am writing this sentence to provide some filler.
Paragraph style is related to the fluidity and rhythm of thought.
This is quite a strange post.
You could describe a paragraph like a container but that is like calling time a calendar.
Maybe the paragraphic flow is unformalizable as it itself forms part of thought process required to formalize?
Why is something so ubiquitous so unbound by any rules other than the alternating dialogue rule mentioned above?
Attempting to formalize while also attempting to avoid using the form or meaning of paragraphs has made this quite a difficult post to make. I’m sure I broke this rule a few times. Also, notice how I didn’t use any commas either.
And I’m spent.
Sometimes I break up a paragraph into two just because the one I wrote looks too long and unwieldy, even though the topic may still be a solid continuation.
When I’m writing directly for a newspaper, I usually remember to do this. When I’m writing reviews for a local arts website, though, I usually write in my natural style, which is more one-thought-per-paragraph: either a few longish sentences or five to seven shorter ones. The editor of that site comes out of newspaper journalism, however, so he will often post the piece with a couple more paragraph breaks than the version I submitted had.
I tend to write paragraphs in the same manner I read them - short.
I figure people will read a bit of the beginning of a paragraph then move on to the next paragraph, so if I want something to be read it’s got to be at the beginning of a paragraph.
I came out of journalism school and went right to writing for the Web and writing scope documents and explanatory emails, so it only makes sense for me to write this way. It helps on message boards, too 
I haven’t written any sort of fiction in ages!
At one time we didn’t.
The earliest texts are written as a continuous stream of symbols. Not only weren’t there paragraphs, there weren’t periods, let alone commas, colons, semicolons, dashes, or any of the other punctuation marks we consider necessary today.
Yes, the ancients text messaged. LOL
Over time, writers adapted texts to make them more readable. It was a slow process, spanning centuries and cultures. Each change was an innovation that had to be invented, adopted, and standardized.
Paragraphing is an art rather than a science. At the same time, a book is a technology. Books have evolved with time just as punctuation did. Try reading a physical book from the 1890s. Most of them don’t feel right, though most people can’t put their finger on why. The height and width of a page, the aspects of a type font, the size of the font and the leading between lines, the brightness of the paper, the contrast of the ink on the page, every physical aspect that goes into the making of a book changes little by little with time. The choices we consider optimal today were not known or not possible then. Hence, old books read funny.
Paragraphs were adjusted for the experience of reading. They are heavily dependent on the width of a text line and the font used. A paragraph longer than a page loses all visual cues and is easy for the eye to get lost in. Very few writers refuse to break up text into smaller blocks, but there are always exceptions. The great writers can break any rules and experimental writers break rules just to force people to think about the act of reading. Everybody else is wrong.
Computer screens are much wider than book pages. Screen fonts are not optimal for reading. Contrast is much lower than book pages (unless screens are set too bright, in which case contrast is too great). That’s a major reason why book people complain about reading on screen. It is simply ergonomically worse.
You can get around some of these faults by changing font size or forcing text into columns. When you read the comments on articles or blogs, they are usually forced into narrow columns. This sends a cue to write brief text so that it doesn’t extend into an unreadable block.
Conversely, a site that sets the default width to the width of the computer screen, like the Dope, allows for long responses but most people would agree that posts should therefore be broken up into short paragraphs because they are more readable in this format. Not everybody does this, though. A few use no paragraphing at all, and they get abused for it.
Back to paragraphs being an art. A good paragraph tells a complete story. That’s why new paragraphs get the “topic sentences” that English teachers try to drum into you. The topic sentence breaks with the previous story and starts a new one. If you find yourself ending the story and starting a new one, that’s the place to start the new paragraph no matter how long the old one has been.
Or you can do so for effect.
Certain people seem to take the idea that reading off a screen is worse than reading off paper as an article of faith; I’ve certainly never seen any of them provide evidence, and it does not match with my own experience. I read books off a screen about as fast as I read off of paper, for about as long, and with no discomfort at all.
That’s nice for you.
And so what? Some people certainly do complain about it. There’s even a current thread, Why do some older people have such trouble reading text/retaining what they have read on screens?, on the issue.
Your personal comfort level makes no difference to those who aren’t comfortable. I’m not comfortable. There. We’re even on anecdotal evidence.
What?
Where is this even coming from?