Last night, I went looking for examples of well-formed paragraphs and it wasn't easy to find one. Most writers, it seems, ignore the rules of composition, using an intuitive sense of when to start a new paragraph. I suppose this could be shown to be true of my writing as well (especially on this blog), but I was surprised at the extent of "the problem". Even works that I had previously thought were very well-written, seem to have been composed with almost no regard for form at this level. I finally found an exception in Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise (Fourth Estate, 2007), a history of twentieth-century music.
Culture ranked low among Franklin Delano Roosevelt's priorities. Music hardly registered at all. To the extent that the president supported the arts, it was with an obligatory aristocratic air. As Richard McKinzie has written, "Roosevelt was willing to do the noble thing, and support painting, theatre, and other creative arts in the same way he supported them as the 'lord' of Hyde Park manor." Alert to all twitches of the political web, Roosevelt knew the dangers inherent in federal funding of the arts. Only with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, the adamantly liberal First Lady, did the experiment last as long as it did.
There's is nothing spectacular about this paragraph. It simply does its job. (For a spectacularly good paragraph, see this post.) It positions the arts (and music specifically) on FDR's list of priorities. It characterizes FDR's attitude (as aristocratic), it cites support from another source (McKinzie), and it explains why FDR prioritized as he did ("the political web"). It has a clear key sentence...
Or does it? What is the key sentence? The most natural candidate is the first one, and there would nothing wrong with reading the paragraph that way. But I think the real key sentence is the second one, except that it really says, "Music hardly registered among Franklin Delano Roosevelt's priorities". Or, the key sentence could be the first sentence with "music" instead of "culture" as the subject. That is, I think the paragraph is supposed to tell us that FDR gave a low priority to music, and that the explanation for this is that he didn't care much about art and culture in general. That the key sentence, then, is not actually there is not really a weakness of the paragraph. It just shows that after you have composed the paragraph around a key sentence, you can reword it for flow. Ross here displays his mastery of the form precisely by not being a slave to it.
I like the way that sounds so much that I'm going to say it again. Whatever their genre, good writers display their mastery of form by not being slaves to it.
Notice also the last sentence. Here Ross hands off the broader subject (of state patronage of the arts under Roosevelt) to his next paragraph (on Eleanor Roosevelt) without leaving the topic of the present paragraph (Franklin Delano Roosevelt). By telling us that is was "only with [her] support" that the experiment lasted, Ross is saying more about the president's commitment to the arts than the First Lady's. Her views and policies, however, are now nicely set up for subsequent elaboration.
I think you'll find that in good writing paragraphing is fluid and intuitive. You won't necessarily find all that many paragraphs that conform to a pre-conceived idea of "well-formedness," with exactly 6 sentences in support of a topic sentence. That doesn't mean that these writers aren't writing good paragraphs: maybe your criterion is too rigid?
ReplyDeleteThat's possible. But I have to say that as I was flipping through my books looking for an example, I wasn't really applying the criterion (5 sentences + key sentence). I assumed that if I found a good paragraph, it would "in some sense" conform (masterfully not slavishly). That's actually what happened with the Ross paragraph.
ReplyDeleteWhat I discovered was that many texts that I had vaguely considered "good" pieces of writing, didn't really consist of good paragraphs. Not just not well-formed, but in real need of rewriting. To my horror, even Goffman came up short.
But maybe I was just tired. (And I didn't think to look in your book ... )
That's interesting because you would think it wouldn't be hard to find good paragraphs. Maybe paragraphing doesn't actually matter as much as we think it does? Those pieces of writing might still be good enough for their purposes until you decide to look too closely.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing: after reading these posts of yours I looked at a recent article of mine and was surprised how often I wrote paragraphs of more-or-less six or seven sentences. Most of my paragraphs were around this long, with a few made longer if you count all the quotes. I follow a kind of rough guideline without even knowing I do it. Partly, it's just a matter of not letting any paragraph get too long on the computer screen before I divide it into two. And of course, I rarely write extremely short paragraphs of four or fewer sentences in formal contexts.
ReplyDeleteWe're definitely zeroing in on the subject of Friday's post! I'm going to look for some more examples. Maybe we get enthralled by writing at the level of the sentence. If each sentence is well-written, we may not notice that the text as a whole is poorly composed.
ReplyDeleteFor a long time, I didn't notice what a great story-teller Hemingway is because the sentences themselves were such a thrill to read, one after the other. I think the first time I noticed "composition" in Hemingway was when I read "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber". (That's not entirely right. I understood how "Cat in the Rain" was composed. But more as a prose poem than as a story.)
I'm getting off topic...