Writing Tools (13 page)

Is there, then, an ideal length for a paragraph? In this sequence of paragraphs from the novel
Democracy,
Joan Didion challenges our assumptions about length:

See it this way.

See the sun rise that Wednesday morning in 1975 the way Jack Lovett saw it.

From the operations room at the Honolulu airport.

The warm rain down on the runways.

The smell of jet fuel.

Can five paragraphs in a row be that short? Three of them sentence fragments? Can a sentence fragment be a paragraph?

Again I found answers in
Modern English Usage.
With typical common sense Fowler begins by telling us what the paragraph is for: "The purpose of paragraphing is to give the reader a rest. The writer is saying to him: 'Have you got that? If so, I'll go on to the next point.' " But how much rest does a reader need? Does it depend on subject matter? Genre or medium? The voice of the author? "There can be no general rule about the most suitable length for a paragraph," writes Fowler. "A succession of very short ones is as irritating as very long ones are wearisome."

In a long paragraph, the writer can develop an argument or build a narrative using lots of related examples. In
Ex Libris
by Anne Fadiman, the typical paragraph is more than a hundred words long, with some longer than a full book page. Such length gives Fadiman the space to develop interesting, quirky ideas:

When I read about food, sometimes a single word is enough to detonate a chain reaction of associative memories. I am like the shoe fetishist who, in order to become aroused, no longer needs to see the object of his desire; merely glimpsing the phrase "spectator pump, size
6V2"
is sufficient. Whenever I encounter the French word
plein,
which means "full," I am instantly transported back to age fifteen, when, after eating a very large portion of
poulet a I'estragon,
I told my Parisian hosts that I was
"pleitte,"
an adjective that I later learned is reserved for pregnant women and cows in need of milking. The word
ptarmigan
catapults me back ten years to an expedition I accompanied to the Canadian Arctic, during which a polar-bear biologist, tired of canned beans, shot a half dozen ptarmigans. We plucked them, fried them, and gnawed the bones with such ravening carnivorism that I knew on the spot I could never, ever become a vegetarian. Sometimes just the contiguous letters
pt
are enough to call up in me a nostalgic rush of guilt and greed. I may thus be the only person in the world who salivates when she reads the words "ptomaine poisoning."

The writer can use the short paragraph, especially after a long one, to bring the reader to a sudden, dramatic stop. Consider this
New York Times
passage from Jim Dwyer, in which a group of men struggle to escape from a stalled elevator in the World Trade Center, using only a window washer's squeegee as a tool.

They did not know their lives would depend on a simple tool.

After 10 minutes, a live voice delivered a blunt message over the intercom. There had been an explosion. Then the intercom went silent. Smoke seeped into the elevator cabin. One man cursed skyscrapers. Mr. Phoenix, the tallest, a Port Authority engineer, poked for a ceiling hatch. Others pried apart the car doors, propping them open with the long wooden handle of Mr. Demczur's squeegee.

There was no exit.

This technique — a four-word paragraph after one of sixty-four words — can be abused with overuse, but to create surprise it packs a punch.

A solid, unified paragraph can act as a mini-narrative, an anecdote that takes a turn in the middle:

As soon as I had tightened my bow there was a burst of applause, but I was still nervous. However, as I ran my swollen fingers over the strings, Mozart's phrases came flooding back to me like so many faithful friends. The peasants' faces, so grim a moment before, softened under the influence of Mozart's limpid music like parched earth under a shadow, and then, in the dancing light of the oil lamp, they blurred into one. (from
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress)

The logic of this paragraph by novelist Dai Sijie is cause and effect, the turn occurring when the sweet music softens the faces of the Chinese peasants.

Another memorable example of a paragraph turn comes from the book
How Soccer Explains the World
by Franklin Foer:

From the newspaper accounts of the period, it's not at all clear that the Jewish team possessed superior talent. But the clippings do make mention of the enthusiastic Jewish supporters and the grit of the players. The grittiest performance of them all came at the greatest moment in Hakoah history. In the third to last game of the 1924-25 season, an opposing player barreled into Hakoah's Hungarian-born goalkeeper Alexander Fabian as he handled the ball. [Here comes the turn.] Fabian toppled onto his arm, injuring it so badly that he could no longer plausibly continue in goal. This was not an easily remediable problem. The rules of the day precluded substitutions in any circumstance. So Fabian returned to the game with his arm in a sling and swapped positions with a teammate, moving up into attack on the outside right. Seven minutes after the calamitous injury, Hakoah blitzed forward on a counterattack. A player called Erno Schwarz landed the ball at Fabian's feet. With nine minutes remaining in the game, Fabian scored the goal that won the game and clinched Hakoah's championship.

This shapely paragraph helps the writer develop a whole story within a story, complete with exposition, complication, resolution, and payoff at the end.

Too many paragraphs of such length, however, eradicate the white space on a page, and white space is the writer's friend — and the reader's. "Paragraphing is also a matter of the eye," writes Fowler. "A reader will address himself more readily to his task if he sees from the start that he will have breathing-spaces from time to time than if what is before him looks like a marathon course."

WORKSHOP

1. Read the paragraph above by Anne Fadiman, which contains 203 words. Could you, if necessary, divide it into two or three paragraphs? Discuss your choices with a friend.

2. Check examples of your recent work. Look for strings of long paragraphs and short ones. Can you take some of the long paragraphs and break them into smaller units? Are the one-sentence paragraphs related enough that they can be joined?

3. In your reading of journalism and literature, pay attention to paragraph length. Look for paragraphs that are either very long or very short. Imagine the author's purpose in each case.

4. In your reading, pay attention to the ventilating effects of white space, especially surrounding the ends of paragraphs. Does the writer use that location as a point of emphasis? Do the words at the end of a paragraph shout, "Look at me!"?

5. Read this section again, looking for examples of paragraphs that take a turn in the middle. Look for them in all of your reading.

A self-conscious writer has no choice but to select a specific number of examples or elements in a sentence or paragraph. The writer chooses the number and, when it is greater than one, the order. (If you think the order of a list unimportant, try reciting the names of the four Evangelists in this order: Luke, Mark, John, and Matthew.)

THE LANGUAGE OF ONE

Let's examine some texts with our X-ray reading glasses, looking beneath the surface meaning to the grammatical machinery at work below.

That girl is smart.

In this simple sentence, the writer declares a single defining characteristic of the girl: her intelligence. We'll need evidence, to be sure. But, for now, the reader must focus on that particular quality. It is this effect of unity, single-mindedness, no-other-alternativeness, that characterizes the language of one.

Jesus wept. Call me.

Call me Ishmael. Go to hell. Here's Johnny. I do.

God is love. Elvis.

Elvis has left the building.

Word.

True.

I have a dream. I have a headache. Not now. Read my lips.

Tom Wolfe once told William F. Buckley Jr. that if a writer wants the reader to think something the absolute truth, the writer should render it in the shortest possible sentence. Trust me.

THE LANGUAGE OF TWO
We are told "That girl is smart," but what happens when we learn:

That girl is smart and sweet.

The writer has altered our perspective on the world. The choice for the reader is not between smart and sweet. Instead, the writer forces us to hold these two characteristics in our mind at the same time. We have to balance them, weigh them against each other, compare and contrast them.

Mom and dad. Tom and Jerry. Ham and eggs.

Abbott and Costello.

Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. Dick and Jane. Rock 'n' roll.

Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. I and thou.

In
The Ethics of Rhetoric,
Richard M. Weaver explains that the language of two "divides the world."

THE LANGUAGE OF THREE

With the addition of one, the dividing power of number two turns into what one scholar calls the "encompassing" magic of number three.

That girl is smart, sweet, and determined.

As this sentence grows, we see the girl in a more well-rounded way. Rather than simplify her as smart, or divide her as smart and sweet, we now triangulate the dimensions of her character. In our language and culture, three provides a sense of the whole:

Beginning, middle, and end.

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Moe, Larry, and Curly.

Tinkers to Evers to Chance.

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi.

Executive, legislative, judicial.

The
Nina
, the
Pinta,
and the
Santa Maria.

At the end of his most famous passage on the nature of love, Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians: "For now, faith, hope, and love abide, these three. But the greatest of all is love." The powerful movement is from trinity to unity, from a sense of the whole to an understanding of what is most important.

THE LANGUAGE OF FOUR AND MORE

In the anti-math of writing, the number three is greater than four. The mojo of three offers a greater sense of completeness than four or more. Once we add a fourth or fifth detail, we have achieved escape velocity, breaking out of the circle of wholeness:

That girl is smart, sweet, determined, and neurotic.

We can add descriptive elements to infinity. Four or more details in a passage can offer a flowing, literary effect that the best writers have created since Homer listed the names of the Greek tribes. Consider the beginning of Jonathan Lethem's novel
Motherless Brooklyn:

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster.
I've got Tourette's.

If we check these sentences against our theory of numbers, it would reveal this pattern: 1 -2-5-1. In the first sentence the author declares a single idea, stated as the absolute truth. In the next sentence, he gives the reader two imperative verbs. In the next, he spins five metaphors. In the final sentence, the writer returns to a definitive declaration — so important he casts it in italics. So good writing is as easy as one, two, three — and four. In summary:

• Use one for power.

• Use two for comparison, contrast.

• Use three for completeness, wholeness, roundness.

• Use four or more to list, inventory, compile, and expand.