How long is a paragraph?

A dense wall of text readers running; so how long is a paragraph?. Online and digital make short paragraphs mandatory.

Attention spans are short, font sizes are small, white space is essential. A tight cluster of sentences in one solid block makes reader’s eyes go fuzzy.

What’s it for?

The paragraph gathers a group of sentences on a common theme, topic or argument. A good paragraph contains enough sentences to advance one idea.

Mid-twentieth century a paragraph might contain ten sentences.  Go further back, paragraphs might fill a third or a half a page, with multiple clauses and sub-clauses. Navigating these old, dense paragraphs is challenge. Literary and academic authors often wrapped whole debates in one paragraph. Back when print was king, paper was expensive. You packed each page.

Online changed all that

Ten sentences fell to five. Now three or four sentences is a common count. And the sentences themselves are getting shorter. Let’s compare:

• Old school: ten sentences, stacked clauses
• New school: three to five short sentences?

The short paragraph has punch. It is dynamic. It holds the attention.

One sentence can be a complete paragraph.

There is no hard rule. There never was. Dickens mixed long and short paragraphs as needed, economical and bullish with his sentences and paragraphs in comparison with his contemporaries.

Formal and Informal

Back in the day, formal writing meant long and dense; informal, short and pithy. Now, the shorter newspaper paragraph appears everywhere.

Fiction is under compression as publishers demand ‘page-turners.’ The fast-cutting style of movies and TV seeps into the written word. Business writing has transformed under the irresistible force of the PowerPoint slide deck, all headings and bullet-lists. Academic papers want more immediacy, impact and memorable, pithy, block-quotable conclusions.

We live in the age of social media and the hundred and forty character sound-bite.

More and more writing and editing happens on devices without proper keyboards. Software tools grade our text based on ‘readability’ scores. Dense text is downgraded. Word-count is king.

More line breaks on the digital page than a paperback or hardback make text easier to read on any screen or device. ‘Reflow’ at different sizes and resolutions is now the Holy Grail.

One or two-sentence paragraphs are the new normal for web pages, blog posts and online news. With headings. Lots more headings.

Conclusion

How long is a paragraph? Shorter than ever before. Long-form prose isn’t dead, it’s making a ‘comeback’ – if you believe it ever went away. But long-form these days means word count. Today’s long-form is equally delivered on screens and devices. That means more short paragraphs consisting of fewer, shorter sentences. So ask yourself: how long is a paragraph?