Lesson 4: Fun with Words: Paragraphs and Beyond

• Introduction
• Lesson
• Practice
• Summary & Tasks

Objectives

Following successful completion of this lesson, students will be able to: To organize and develop ideas in a coherent and unified manner To distinguish between the paragraph formation one would encounter in fiction and the paragraph formation one would encounter in other types of writing To eliminate unnecessary words, phrases, clauses, sentences, or entire paragraphs To edit and to revise sentences in the context of a paragraph or an entire body of writing

Overview

Paragraphs are sets of related sentences, but each writer develops his or her guidelines as to how those sentences relate and even how many sentences constitutes a unit. A fiction writer and non-fiction writer approach paragraphs differently, and even fiction writers handle paragraphs differently. The tips that you will learn in this lesson apply both to fiction and non-fiction, and you can even apply the ideas behind this lesson to poetry and theatric pieces.

 

Check It Out

Compare the three prose excerpts below. Both Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner won numerous writing awards. How does Hemingway's handling of the paragraph differ from Faulkner's handling of the paragraph? Which do you prefer?

Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea sample paragraph—
The old man had seen many great fish. He had seen many that weighed more than a thousand pounds and he had caught two of that size in his life, but never alone. Now alone, and out of sight of land, he was fast to the biggest fish that he had ever seen and bigger than he had ever heard of, and his left hand was still as tight as the gripped claws of an eagle.

William Faulkner's "The Brooch" sample paragraph—
The telephone waked him. He waked already hurrying, fumbling in the dark for robe and slippers, because he knew before waking that the bed beside his own was still empty, and the instrument was downstairs just opposite the door beyond which his mother had lain propped upright in the bed for five years, and he knew on waking the he would be too late because she would already have heard it, just as she heard everything that happened at any hour in the house.

William Faulkner's Light in August sample paragraph—
Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like blacktears.