On Monday, 28th February 2011 at 10:49:40 (GMT -0700 MST), Lee Passey wrote:
I simply cannot accept the notion that a paragraph is merely a typographical convention.
That notion is nonsense. Paragraphs are units of *meaning*, and very important ones. Anyone who has ever studied stylistics knows that. There's a big difference between: She wanted to kill him, but didn't. She wanted to kill him. But she didn't. She wanted to kill him. But she didn't. I believe it was a favourite stylistic means of Dashiell Hammett's to end many of his hard-boiled private-eye stories with the terse 3-word paragraph: "They hanged him." That's a big difference from simply attaching those 3 words to the preceding paragraph! The impact of such a terse, isolated paragraph is a lot stronger on the reader, and makes for a much better "punchline" than other endings the writer could have come up with. -- Yours, Alex. www.aboq.org [processed by "The Bat!", Version 4.2.10.12]