I’ve talked about sentence lengths before but how long should a paragraph be? The answer, as usual, is that there is no hard and fast rule – some paragraphs consist of a single line, or even word, whereas in other cases they can go on for a page or more!
The Times newspaper, that arbiter of good grammar, advises its journalists, “Rarely should a paragraph be of only one sentence, least of all a short one, unless special emphasis is needed. Long paragraphs are tedious but short ones are jerky and can be equally hard to follow.”
When deciding where to break your paragraph, think of it acting as a natural pause, a breathing space for reader and writer. A new paragraph essentially marks a break or change in the flow of thought, which we typically signify by starting on a new line. So my advice is before pressing the Return key, pause to ask yourself, “Have I finished that thought?”
But if you all these grammatical do’s and don’ts seem like too much of a bore, simply ask Words etc for a quote to produce some well-written, grammatically correct wording for your next marketing project.
