"Marcello" == Marcello Perathoner <marcello@perathoner.de> writes:
Marcello> On 02/28/2011 12:07 PM, Keith J. Schultz wrote: >> Really! Who is here illiterate here. What does the semantic >> definition of a paragraph have that a Chapter title does not ? Marcello> RTFW: Marcello> "A paragraph [...] is a self-contained unit of a Marcello> discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or Marcello> idea." This seems to me perfectly coherent with most chapter titles. The point for me is rather that we have two different concepts: the chapter header, that can be empty, (displayed as vertical space) or contain several items, including a title (often a short paragraph, but may also consist of more than one paragraph), and identifier (usually a number), a summary, an epigraph, etc. The TOC should point to the chapter header, not the chapter title, that often is missing. A chapter body (that follows the header, and in extreme cases may be empty) is usually composed of paragraphs, but may contain other things, for example a chapter in a book of poetry does not contain paragraphs. And I think that the wikipedia definition is too narrow, if not just wrong. I have seen paragraphs (in dialogue) that consist just of --... The distinctive character of a paragraph is IMHO the display, you can run two paragraphs together and obtain one paragraph, only with changes in whitespace. Hence a paragraph is a typographical unit, not necessarily a logical unit (even if good typography usually makes paragraph breaks coincide with logical units). The fact that usually the paragraph breaks are decided by the author does not contradict that it is a typographical concept. Carlo