On Paragraph Length; or, I vs. E, Except After C:

[The following is an adaptation of a comment I left earlier this afternoon which turned out less germane than I thought it'd be.  What can I say?  "One of those days" has morphed into "one of those weeks," but it will not snowball into "one of those summers." ]

As y'all know, I’m delivering a conference paper on the relationship of blogging and academia, and one of the points I want to address is the length and substance of blog posts.  When I read piny's complaint about paragraph length, I pounced on the opportunity to defend my long-paragraphers.  One respondent embodied the "longist" ideology.  (Not to be confused with the antithetical "longest" ideology.  This unfortunate phrasing has confused spectators at longist protests of longest events and vice versa.  They try to disambiguate their positions by reducing their homophonic labels to the seemingly straightfoward "I" and "E."  Then the "Unix First" crowd drives up and what had merely "confused" the spectators becomes utterly inexplicable.  On the main stage a longest contingent reenacts the infamous morality play "Death of Sir Attention Span."  To its left, a man with an "I" painted on his smooth chest is heard declaiming "the hegemonic forces marshalled against brevity" shortly before being engulfed by a huddle of penguins.  As the play ends a young woman with an eye crudely silk-screened on her shirt hops on stage and warns everyone about Big Brother and his appetite for Your Personal Information.  But boy howdy do I digress.)  One longinista wrote:

One long paragraph often means it was written and never edited. It is poor writing, since good writing is almost entirely editing and rewriting.

I agree with the second half, but not the first.  A long paragraph doesn’t necessarily mean it’s never been edited. If you were to walk into my classroom and ask my kids “What is writing?” they’d answer, in unison, “Writing is rewriting.” But they’ll still write long paragraphs when it’s appropriate. Here’s an example (stolen from the Writer-L listserv) I use in the classroom :

I have the option of tuning out, half-listening, drifting about mentally while glancing around at the crowded and noisy dining room, watching almost simultaneously a sporting event being shown on television above the bar, an attractive blonde sitting sideways on a stool, and a fat man sitting at a nearby table with his mouth open, about to devour a piece of fish, a slender slice of flounder; and suddenly I imagine the fish coming to life, jumping off the fork, wiggling along the floor, and being retrieved by a waiter, who carries it in a napkin back to the kitchen, where I have visions of the fish swimming backward in time, a flashback fish floating freely ten days before in the Labrador Sea of northeastern Canada, a fish that is flat-bodied and pancake-size and has two eyes on the same side of its head, a Picasso fish, cruising easily along the muddy bottom of the sea in search of a shrimp until five minutes before sunrise, it glides into a net, is trapped, is confused, is frightened, but is not alone - hundreds of other Picasso-eyed flounder are ensnared there, swirling around, bumping into one another, angling to flip over the their seeing-eye side, hoping to figure out what’s going on - but then they are squeezed together as the big net soars drippingly out of the sea and scrapes along the side of a ship that is piloted by a bearded, brandy-breathed, scrawny, wife-abusing French-Canadian fisherman, who had been illegally trawling in that area all week, and who now, after grabbing fistfuls of wiggling fish out of the net with his gloved hands, hurls them into an ice-filled hold in the stern of his ship, and then starts his engine for the six-hour journey to the dockside depot of a seafood distributorship in Newfoundland, from which the fish will be flown a day later in refrigerated aluminum containers to JFK airport in New York, where Mafia-affiliated teamsters will receive them and drive them to the Fulton Street market, then deliver them into the hands of wholesale dealers whose vans on the following morning will be double-parked in front of myriad Manhattan restaurants, including Elaine’s Neapolitan chef, and will be cleaned by her Spanish-speaking scullions, and will be prepared and offered that night as a fresh fish special - flounder meuniere almondine, twenty-nine dollars - and this is what was ordered by, and brought to, the fat man I saw sitting in front of me with his mouth agape.

Granted, that’s not only a single paragraph–it’s a single sentence–but it works. (Or doesn’t. There was a lively debate about whether it did or not, as you’d expect on a listserv full of professional writers and “professional” lurkers.) I don’t think you can, as a general rule, divorce length from content. You can divorce it from style, i.e. you can say that a page-long paragraph doesn’t belong in an Associated Press article, but not content.

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure you can divorce it from context either: when I read my students’ articles, I do so in Word’s “Reading Layout.” Doing so transforms even short paragraphs into page-spanners, which may account for why I’ve trained myself to focus on paragraph coherence instead of length.

I go on at such length because of comments like Deborah's:

I never read them for long enough to draw a conclusion.

And never will.

I don’t mean to attack Deborah–who used a savvy line-break to emphasize the beat before the “and”–only suggest that she give some of us long-paragraphers a chance. We’re not all lazy editors. (I note the nice line-break to demonstrate the beauty of the form-content relationship in her comment, and perhaps convince that some long paragraphs are constructed with a similar concern for effect.)

That said, of course I agree with everyone that blather is blather is blather. I wonder though if we’re not being deceived as to the length of what we read when read so much single-columned material online. A post which would look short here would look unbearable in a single-column format.  Compare, for example, the first post of this paragraph here (two columns, no right margin), here (three columns, resizable center column) and here (single column, fixed width).

Doesn’t that same paragraph look and, more importantly, feel longer or shorter depending on the format?

Comments

[Andy]

Where's that paragraph from? It's pretty cool, and if it's from something longer I'd like to read it.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Andy, the person who posted it did so before the release of Gay Talese's A Writer's Life but implied that that was its source. The Writer-L listserv is an incredlble resource. Fifteen Pulitzer Prize winners subscribe; they discuss their craft, the rest of us lurk and learn. I say this not to sell the listserv on anyone, but because they often discuss books which have yet to be published and must therefore be oblique in their references to the works in question. I'm about 90% sure that that paragraph is from Talese's memoir; however, I'm 100% certain that if you like it, you wouldn't despise TAlese's memoir (that is, so long as it resembles his other work, which is of singularly high quality). That said, if you liked that sentence, I think you'd love John McPhee, who is the master of such sinuous sentence structure. To wit (see the last one, esp.):

The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc of about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand. (374)

As we could plainly see from the interstate, the rock now residing in that striped mountainside had once been brutally shoved around—shoved, not pulled, and with such force that a large part of it had been tipped up more than ninety degrees, to and well beyond the vertical. Overturned. Such violence can happen on an epic scale. There is an entire nation in Europe that is upside down. (50)

The declivity was by no means sheer, just steep—a steepness, I judged, that would have caused the vehicle, had it slipped off the road, to go end over end enveloped in flame at a hundred yards a bounce. (106)

On the striated pavement of Algeria lies the till of polar glaciers. there are tropical atolls in Canada, tropical limestones in Siberia, tropical limestones in Antarctica. (115)

Certain English geologists produced confusion by embracing continental drift and then drawing up narratives and maps that showed continents moving all over the earth with respect to a fixed and undriftable England. (118)

The swelling up of mountains was described as an orogeny. Ontogeny, phylogenry, orogeny—accent syllable two. The Antler Orogeny, the Avalonian Orogeny, the Taconic, Acadian, Alleghenian Orogenies. the Laramide orogeny. The center of the United States had had a dull geologic history—nothing much being accumulated, nothing much being eroded away. It was just sitting there conservatively. The east had once been radical—had been unstable, reformist, revolutionary, in the paleozoic pulses of three or four orogenies. Now, for the last hundred and fifty million years, the east had been stable and conservative. The far-out stuff was in the far west of the country—wild, weirdsma, with its welded tuffs and Franciscan melange (internally deformed, complex beyond analysis). (32)

Those quotations are all from Annals of the Former World, which is quite possibly my favorite book; at the very least, it's the one I talk about and recommend most often.

[Alex]

Proust would be proud.

[Vance Maverick]

I find long paragraphs (say Proust's) harder to read on the web than in print. And most long-paragraph bloggers aren't as lively as Scott — even when Timothy Burke or Glenn Greenwald writes something I like, I always wish they'd rewrite it with half as many words. For me at least, they're making their stuff hard to read, in a way that clearly could be avoided.

Or put another way, there's a significant minority of writers who find it easy to type out a whole bunch of stuff fast. Of the long paragraphs found on the web, they account for a majority. So I understand readers who say "if it's long, it should have been edited" — though of course I know long paragraphs can be glorious. Not sure about your specific examples here, Scott....but wouldn't you say we could pick out some fine ones from Darwin?

[john_m_burt]

My wife charmed me, early in our courtship, by telling me about her experiences writing with a dip pen. Among other things, she noticed that her sentences and paragraphs had become longer and more elegant, a change she attributed to the opportunity for a thoughtful pause which was provided by the moment it takes to dip the pen before you can resume writing.

On the other hand, the writer Avram Davidson attributed his long sentences and paragraphs to his acquisition of an electric typewriter.

[Paul Gowder]

In defense of long paragraphs:

Joyce.

[David R. Block]

As a reader and not a writer, if you make it long, try not to put me to sleep before the end. And convoluted isn't nice, most of the time.

That's all I ask.

[forgottenboy]

Does anyone else feel that what makes the long paragraph, um, flounder is the weird mixing of registers? In general, long paragraphs can be successful, whether in blogs or in books. Joyce makes a fine example.

But that's not the same as writing a paragraph which seems to be trying to make an environmental/empathetic argument through a series of caricatures which are offensive from start to finish. If the point is overfishing, why not make that point in simple, effective prose)? If the point is that fishermen often beat their wives, or that the Mafia has infiltrated flounder delivery, or that double parking begins with flatfish, well, I'm going to need a little more data. I mean, even the guy at the end of the line is getting hammered for being fat.

Plus, it always looks bad when a paragraph that is sort of making a political argument is also full of irrelevant lyricism and references to Picasso. Not every paragraph can be DeLillo and Kozol at the same time. Wriggling fish, fine. Finding Nemo-esque references to the existentialist/Cubist crises of the flounder blinded by flounders cross a line. I prefer Benjamin Kunkel, who wrote about this exact epiphany (i.e. "Mommy, where does the supermarket food come from?") with grace instead of meanness in his novel Indecision.