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Why Save the Paragraph?
This group is dedicated to my mission to Revive the use of the paragraph in student writing.
With each passing semester, I see more and more papers comprising a single paragraph. Some might be a few inches in length; others might be several pages of ideas crammed into one sometimes organized unit.
Over the years that I have been reading freshman placement essays, I have noticed a remarkable decline in the use of paragraphs. I am certain that this summer I have read more essays that were never paragraphed than those that were.
When I began teaching compsotion, paragraphing was not part of my course curriculum—most students bridged from high school to college with a basic understanding of how to use paragraphs to structure and organize any piece of writing. Now, I teach it regularly in all levels of courses, sometimes with great difficulty—Students tell me that they “do not understand HOW to paragraph.” “Every idea in the paper is related,” they tell me. They argue that “It’s all the same topic.”
Why is this standard convention of English such a mystery to our students? I have a few ideas:
1) One of the ways we come to understand how writing works is through reading. Our students, in general, are not reading widely and carefully, and therefore, are not observing and absorbing how paragraphs move the reader through a writer’s ideas.
2) Our students are writing to one another, almost constantly, in IM and TXTMSG interfaces. Unfortunately, this writing is in short, snippets, often in incomplete sentences, and often without context. When others read the exchanges within social networking sites, they rarely see multiple paragraphs, and thus, do not see them as organizing structures.
3) Writing they see on the Web is often well-organized in paragraphs, but those written to the stylebook conventions for the Internet which separates chunks of text by white-space without indents, or by numbering or bulleting. These are appropriate conventions for the genre, yet students don’t seem to feel comfortable copying in academic writing.
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