A Mile-Long Eyesore – A Rant About the Composition of a Paragraph

What is so hard about properly writing a paragraph? I don’t care if you’re a reborn Saint spouting the gospel of God, if your writing consists of paragraphs that rival the span of my page scroll I refuse to read what you have to say. I do not want to see giant blocks of text that make me want to go screaming off into the horizon while clawing out my eyes in a vain attempt to remove the horrors I have been witness to.

There are hundreds of tutorials and how-to guides out there for your viewing pleasure. If you’re interested in writing, I should think learning how to properly construct paragraphs would be somewhere at the top of your to-do list. Apparently for a vast majority of people it isn’t, however. Here’s a brief summarization to clue you in: a paragraph should generally open with a topic sentence, followed by supporting sentences, and then closed by a concluding sentence. Paragraphs are usually comprised of about five to seven sentences, not fifty.

It’s not that hard. I know it’s sometimes a fine line between too little detail and going overboard with your verbosity, but there really is no excuse for having a paragraph that could easily be broken down into twenty smaller paragraphs. I attribute a growth of laziness and ignorance in the general populace for this trend.

In an age where people find Eragon to be an inspiring piece of work done by a boy genius (when in reality the pages of that book aren’t even worthy of being used as toilet paper), maybe properly structuring a paragraph is the least of our worries.