The Importance of Paragraphs

 When you see one of the infamous "walls of text"- a large chunk of text without paragraph breaks- do you think "This passage is such a pain to read?" I certainly do, but I also think, "The person who wrote it isn't very good at organizing their thoughts."

Throughout my time in school, I was taught that each paragraph in an essay or other informative piece (a review, a news story, etc.) should be for a specific idea. Whenever I wrote an essay, I would write outlines in which each paragraph would contain one of my main points, and each sentence would either support or explain that point. By the time I had my outline finished, I generally knew what I wanted to say and even had a good idea of how long it would be, and the only thing left was to actually write up my piece.

A wall of text has no such organization. Rather than organizing their thoughts into the right categories and logically linking them together, the writers of such walls of text simply keep on writing whatever comes to mind, only stopping when the piece is finished. Assuming that they did not suffer an error of some sort that deleted all the line breaks, then they likely started their project without any real plan for what they wanted to say or how they wanted to say it.

Another crutch that amateur writers use is the bulleted list. In the hands of a skilled writer, it can effectively list various points in a clear and easy-to-read format, whether to serve as lists of examples or possibly as a summary of the work. Unfortunately, many reviewers seem to believe that the best way to write a review is to list the strengths and weaknesses of a work being reviewed without elaborating on their points. Written pieces that consist of bulleted lists are usually as poorly organized as walls of text are, even if they are easier to read.

Organizing one's thoughts is a significant part of writing well, so it is important to learn how to do so. The most critical skills for producing a well-organized piece are the ability to plan out what you want to say, the skill to sort your thoughts into appropriate categories and the common sense to know what works best for your project. This isn't an easy thing to do, but it becomes more manageable once you acquire more experience.