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Paragraphs

Image of a stone wall.

Like sentences, first-draft paragraphs often go on and on, wandering from one topic to another. But in the final version, each paragraph should relate to only one idea.

Build each paragraph like you’d build a brick wall:

  1. Choose the components that fit.
    The first step in building a wall is to make sure you have bricks of the same type. In the same way, the first step in constructing a paragraph is to make sure you have sentences about the same idea. Set aside any bricks or sentences that don’t fit.

  2. Arrange and connect them.
    A pile of bricks is not a wall, and a collection of sentences is not a paragraph. The separate components have to be connected to form a coherent whole. The mortar of a paragraph is the connections between its sentences. This can be simple sentence order, or connective words and phrases.

Then repeat the process with the sentences you set aside. If they have a place in your document, it’s because they have their own separate idea or ideas.

One idea per paragraph

The first step in improving your first-draft paragraphs is to make sure that each of them is about just one thing. Each one should explain only one idea.

The duty commander of a Babylon station monitors ships leaving the system. Exiting ships are required to declare a flag registry and destination. Ships arriving in the system must immediately transmit their previous exit declaration. The jump gate controller opens the gate and holds it open until the exiting ship is through.

In the example above, almost all of the sentences are about what happens when ships leave a star system with a Babylon station in it. But one sentence is about ships arriving in the system.

It’s clear how that sentence ended up in the first draft. The writer had just mentioned exit declarations (of a ship’s flag registry and destination). So they clearly followed that train of thought into the next sentence.

But it’s a distraction to a reader who is trying to understand what happens when ships leave a system containing a Babylon station. So it should be moved to another paragraph about when ships arrive in such a system.

The duty commander of a Babylon station monitors ships leaving the system. Exiting ships are required to declare a flag registry and destination. The jump gate controller opens the gate and holds it open until the exiting ship is through.
 

Ships arriving in the system must immediately transmit their previous exit declaration.

Deciding how to divide up a paragraph is an art. It depends on which ideas, which distinctions, are important in your document. You can slice the same pile of information in different ways for different documents. Imagine how the example paragraph would be divided if you were writing a set of role descriptions for a Babylon station command crew.

Connect the sentences

The duty commander of a Babylon station monitors ships leaving the system. Exiting ships are required to declare a flag registry and destination. The jump gate controller opens the gate and holds it open until the exiting ship is through.

Now all of the sentences in the paragraph are about the same thing: ships leaving a system with a Babylon station. But they don’t hang together. The events the sentences describe don’t seem to have any relationship to each other.

They’re like a pile of bricks, not a wall. There’s no mortar, no connection. Without that, each sentence raises contextual questions that the paragraph doesn’t answer.

  • How does the duty commander monitor the ships?

  • Why do ships make an exit declaration?

  • When does the jump gate controller open the gate?

When you answer these questions, the sentences in the paragraph stop being a collection of random events that happen to take place in roughly the same place and time. They become a process, with reasons for the individual steps and a flow of control.

The duty commander of a Babylon station monitors ships leaving the system. To keep the duty commander informed, exiting ships are required to declare a flag registry and destination. When the duty commander gives the signal, the jump gate controller opens the gate and holds it open until the exiting ship is through.

Tables

If it’s a table, make it a table

Two types of droid are common on cruisers. Protocol droids, such as the humaniform C-3 series, specialize in human-cyborg relations. They are not designed for maintenance work. Meanwhile, R2 units have barrel shapes with multitool extensions, which makes them suitable for many solo engineering tasks. Unlike C-3 droids, they are not shipped with vocoders.​

Sometimes you’ll see a paragraph like the one above, which floods the reader with parallel information about similar things. Readers will probably end up taking notes to keep track of which type of droid does what. Those notes will probably be some kind of table.

If you’re the writer, spare your reader and give them the table.

Table 1. Common droid types on cruisers

Series

Type

Function

Form factor

Vocoder

C-3

Protocol

Human-cyborg relations

Humaniform

Y

R2

Maintenance

Solo engineering

Barrel with multitool

N

When readers approach any block of text, they have to figure out how to process it. What is the writer doing here? What’s important? How does the intformation relate? As with lists, the format of a table conveys information before the reader even starts looking at the content.

Readers who see a table know it contains an array of similar items being evaluated using a consistent set of categories. Understanding that at a glance is a lot less work than wading through the block of text to figure it out. So your reader can get on with deciding which droid they need for their ship.

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