Over the past few years of teaching undergraduates, I noticed a trend. Students were becoming excessively concerned with paragraphs. They would write two-page paragraphs, and refuse to break them up, because “it is all one idea.” Or they come pleading for transitions.  ”How can I possibly connect one paragraph to the next?” seems as dominant a question  as “Can you proofread this?” Their essays are typographically paragraph-based as well. Many are double-spaced AND indented, asserting through spacing that “now I have finished one idea and am moving to another!!!”

Why this paragraphism? Two recent, unrelated developments, I hazard: 1.) Composing on computers. A word processing screen in “normal” view frames writing on the paragraph level. Rather than conceive of one’s writing surface as a page–as when writing longhand on an 8 1/2″x11″ piece of paper, or, when typewriting, peeking behind the carriage return to see how much of a page is left–a monitor focuses our attention on the paragraph. 2.) Standardized testing. The five-paragraph essay is, after-all, named after this odd unit of breaking up thoughts, and high-school teachers and first-year writing instructors needing to prepare students for AP exams, SAT writing tests and exit exams teach to the paragraph.

Why does paragraph ascendency matter? Two reasons: it takes focus away from the sentence, where voice, style and tone are found, and it influences how we think about ideas–in shorter, discrete bursts that often leave too much “space” between each other, thus truncating thoughts. It stymies the development of more complex, sophisticated thoughts.