Do I Indent My Paragraphs?

There are two ways to indicate a new paragraph:

• indent the first line of the paragraph by one-half inch
• do not indent, but leave extra space between paragraphs

Conveniently, we can set our word-processing programs to leave extra space after the hard return which tells the program that you are starting a new paragraph.

The current rule is to either indent or leave the space, but do not do both.

There is a popular style of writing blogs, business memos, letters, and reports called "Full Block."  In this style, paragraphs are not indented.  As you can see, I consistently leave a space between paragraphs rather than indent.  Increasingly, everything we write is left- margin justified. There is always a blank space between paragraphs.

I have been, perhaps unnecessarily, encouraging my students to indent paragraphs for non-business writing.  Most essay writing that they do for me is informal story-telling as they reflect on communication events in their lives.  Indenting, rather that leaving the blank space sometimes means they can fit the whole story onto one page, but there is no particular other reason to indent.  I imagine I am being anachronistic in preferring indentation for non-business writing.  It tends to make the writing look more like the narrative story that it is and less like the business report/school assignment that it also is.

But the official non-rule is that the indentation sends the same message as the space between paragraphs.  We must indicate a shift in perspective by starting a new paragraph.  To fit a page, indent your paragraphs; otherwise, suit yourself and be consistent.
 

Comma Coma #4: She said, "He said." Writing Conversations

It seems that my appetite for comma comments is large.

 In my last blog, I recommended that you be selective in your choice of insertions.  Some commas are considered more necessary than others, such as the comma that introduces a quotation.  

My student wrote:

One day my frustration came out in a question to my manager "What would you do if I resigned?"

I'd put a comma after manager.  I'd put a comma before every quotation in order to indicate a new tone of voice and to separate the quotation from the rest of the sentence.

I would also put commas and periods inside quotation marks, like this:

"The town was just too small for that to happen," Joe told me, "and we have to placate the rowdy bullies."

Punctuating quoted material requires thought.  For example, let's take a long quotation and put our "he said" in the middle:

"My teacher is obsessed with punctuation," he said, "and is force-feeding us a solid diet of commas."

1. Why is the second comma in that sentence?  Why is "and" not capitalized?
2. How would you change the quotation and punctuation if you decided to put a period after "said"?

EDIT:  My students often want to put a period after a quotation that ends in a question mark or exclamation mark.  Here is a sentence I just read:

I should have said, "Are you saying the dress code is unreasonable?  Is that it?".

There is no need for the final period.  The question mark adequately ends the sentence.

One more thing:  

Start a new paragraph with every new speaker.

From my student's essay:

"How can I be a better listener?" I asked my wife.  She replied, "Show you're listening by looking at me, nod, smile, and take out your earbuds."  "I can hear you with my earbuds in," I replied defensively.

Rewrite:
     "How can I be a better listener?" I asked my wife.  
     She replied, "Show you're listening by looking at me.  Nod, smile, and take out your earbuds."
     "I can hear you with my earbuds in," I replied defensively.

Answers

1.  "[H]e said" should be considered an interrupting phrase and is, thus, surrounded with commas.  "And" is not capitalized because it does not start a new sentence.

2.  "My teacher is obsessed with punctuation," he said.  "He is force-feeding us a solid diet of commas."

Paragraph Lengths

Writing is about CONTENT.  Readers are looking for your message and your thoughts.  Readers take in information in chunks.  Interested readers will try to understand the content chunk by chunk.  Let's look at a piece of writing as a meal:

a five-course Indian meal or a five-course Japanese meal or any meal really.  

The courses of the meal can be of varying sizes and ingredients, but you do not want to totally stuff yourself on any of the courses or you won't have room for dessert.

It's the same with writing.

Let's consider our ingredients:

1.  A phoneme is a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another.  Consider the phoneme as a molecule of an ingredient of food in your five-course meal.

Phonemes differ from language to language and can be a source of errors.
A student sent me this email:  "My plane was delayed.  There was a tycoon."

He chose the wrong phoneme and mixed up the "k" sound in "tycoon" with the "f" sound of "typhoon."  If you choose the wrong phoneme, you lose the meaning of your word and ultimately of your sentence.

2.  A word is a unit of meaning composed of one or more phonemes.  Consider the word to be like an ingredient in one of the courses in your meal.  

3.  A sentence is a collection of words put together to create a message that includes a subject and a verb.  The subject is usually a noun and the noun can "be" or can "do" something in your sentence.  Just like you need the right ingredients to make a soup and not a soufflé, you need specific parts of speech to make your sentences say what you want.  You need a noun and a verb.  To add flavour, you might throw in an adverb or adjective.  Articles, conjunctions, and prepositions are the secret ingredients that hold your dish together.

To sustain the metaphor, the ingredients (words) are put into sentences (dishes). 
These dishes will form a course of your meal.  For example, stir-fried vegetables, rice, and a chicken ball might be your main course.  Broth, won tons, and green onions together would be the soup course.

4.  Related sentences are grouped together to form paragraphs.  When the story takes a turn, the writer will usually start a new paragraph.  When you finish one course - soup, salad, or appetizer - you move smoothly into your next one.  Your paragraphs are just long enough to give you the flavours of that dish and lead you to the next.

The meal analogy can work for short pieces of writing.  In longer pieces of writing, you must create a section or a chapter composed of several paragraphs.  Give it a sub-heading to guide the readers along.

This meditation occurred because I was reading an essay that has four paragraphs consisting of 408, 186, 120, and 359 words.  My reading was interrupted by the long paragraphs and instead of finishing my marking, I wrote this blog.

I wish the long paragraphs were broken into more bite-size pieces.  Paragraphs should not fill a page if you want to write better (dammit).