The Paragraph, Part 1

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the standard nugget of textual thought: the paragraph.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of
My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick.
And in today's episode, I wanted to take a look

(00:21):
at a writing convention, and that is the paragraph or
the paragraph break. I think there was a single moment
of genesis in my desire to do this episode, and
it's that, Uh, you know, some number of weeks back,
I was doing research for some episode and I ended
up looking up an archived plane text version of an

(00:43):
old book. Rob I'm sure you've had this issue on
the show before. So you get plain text and the
text is there, but all the original paragraph breaks are
messed up, like they're they're either in the wrong place
or there are no breaks, and I was like trying
to read it. I was just like, this is horrible.
I hate this. Even though the whole text is here,

(01:06):
I'm basically incapable of reading it. Somehow, the existence of
paragraphs with reasonable breaks is what makes a massive text
physically consumable to me, right and and certainly if it
is supposed to be paragraphs, is supposed to have paragraph
breaks in it. Um It's like if someone were to
bring a seven course meal to you and say here,

(01:29):
here it is in stew form. Um, please enjoy it.
I mean. And it hasn't been blended up in this
scenario at all. So it's not like it is it
is garbled. All of it is still there. But here
it is without the little breaks. Here it is just
all you know, either either in the same pot or
even just mashed together on the same plate. No, no, no,
I want these We need these breaks between these different
things that we're going to consume. Uh, there needs to

(01:51):
be an order to to what is occurring, right, Why
not just put the tierramisiou in the clam chowder and
then you get it all at once? Um? Yeah. And
so this got me thinking about paragraphs in general, and
wondering about where they come from historically, and why we
build them the way that we do, if there even
is a consistent way that we build them, and all

(02:13):
kinds of questions like this, And one thing I thought
might be interesting to get us kicked off today is
to just talk about the literary effect, the effect on
the reader when you're reading a book with a lot
of long paragraphs versus short paragraphs. Like, how does that
change the experience of reading and the impression created. I'm

(02:35):
sure other people have different ways of answering this, but
one immediate distinction I thought of in my own reading
experience has to do with the feeling of substance versus
the feeling of momentum, and I would explain it like this.
When I think about good books with very short paragraphs,
I tend to think about readability and hooky noess. Like

(02:57):
you know, airport thriller novels. They tend have very short paragraphs,
and those short paragraphs are I think effective for what
they're meant to do. That they tend to make the
text easy to read. They make it feel like it's
fast moving and inviting. It wants to keep you reading,
making you less likely to put the book down. Meanwhile,

(03:17):
when I think about good books with very long paragraphs,
I tend to think about literary richness, like obsessive observation
or description or insight texts that feel like they are
packed with detail and texture and thoughtfulness. Um So, in
trying to like balance out those two different advantages you

(03:38):
get from different paragraph links, I came up with a
kind of perhaps silly metaphor but I started thinking about
trips to bring groceries in from the car. You know,
you ever go out shopping, you have a bunch of
different things, and you can, you know, you can take
one or two bags each time, or you can try
to do everything in one go, but sometimes that's impossible
and you have to stop halfway to the door. So

(03:59):
like when you're paragraphs are too short, it's almost like
you're trying to bring the groceries in one item at
a time. Something just starts to feel kind of insubstantial
and absurd about what you're doing. But if paragraphs are
too long, that's kind of like trying to bring everything
in in one trip and you just stop, like you
have to put it down and decide, okay, I can't
do this. So you're kind of balancing mobility, the mobility

(04:22):
of carrying less with the substance of carrying more. I
think that's a good That's an interesting way of thinking
about it. That's certainly because because the other side of
that is I'm instantly thinking of the person that is
obscenely trying to carry all the groceries in in one go,
like you know, and I've I've I think I've tried
to do this before. Where you're you're just you have

(04:43):
multiple grocery bag straps on each hand, you have something
on your arm cradling something. Yeah, and then yeah, I
guess you're planning on opening the door with your foot
or just slamming into it or hoping there's somebody on
the other side to help you in. And here's the thing,
as the reader, like I'm either the door or I'm
the person on the other side of the scenario, and

(05:04):
you just would want to be like, calm down a
little bit, like I bought the book, or I I
rented the book, or I borrowed the book from the library,
whatever the case may be. We can get to all this.
We don't have to have it all in the first paragraph, right.
And this is not I think this is not unique
to modern readers. I mean people who are writing handbooks
of composition and rhetoric in in centuries past warn that

(05:28):
overly long paragraphs have the effect of quote over taxing
the reader. There's something about unbroken blocks of text that
just gets tiresome, and somehow, even though the text continues
either way, just putting more breaks in between, separating that
in the smaller chunks. Smaller paragraphs somehow makes the text

(05:49):
feel lighter and like you're just sort of like skipping
over it at a you know, at a breezy pace,
as opposed to getting bogged down and feeling this weight.
I was looking around for different writings on paragraphs and
I actually came across the night paper titled writing Paragraphs
by Tolkien at all uh, and it's it is j R.
Tolkien himself and wow, weird. Weirdly enough, one of the

(06:11):
co authors was a professor at Memphis State in Tennessee. Uh.
I didn't get to the bottom of how these individuals
all come together on being credit on the same paper,
but it gets into some of the basics and challenges
and goals of of teaching effective writing. But even in
this paper, the authors point out that the unity of
a given paragraph is often illusory. A longer paragraph, they

(06:35):
point out, can often be broken into without upsetting anything.
And they point out, for instance, this is often done
at the spirits, certainly at the editing phase and newspapers. Uh.
The the author wrote a paragraph it's a little bit
too long looking on the screen, you just shop that
sucker in half. And a lot of times you can
do that without any ill effect, And likewise they point
out that the reverse is true. In many cases. You

(06:56):
can take shorter paragraphs and kind of combine them together
and you're not going do effectively break anything. So that's
I think that's something interesting to keep in mind, even
though at the same time they are acknowledging that, yeah,
a lot of paragraph writing is about Okay, here's your
this is the stuff we all learn in school, right
here is our our topic sentence. Then we have supporting sentences,

(07:17):
and the paragraph is supposed to be this one concise
nugget of thought for us to consume. Well, that's a
great transition to the next thing I wanted to get out,
which is that you know, of course we're talking about
reporting our subjective feelings as a reader on you know,
reading paragraphs of different links. But the other side of
the approach to paragraphs is the more prescriptive approach. You know,

(07:39):
here's what a paragraph must do, with the most famous
or uh if you like, infamous prescription being that a
paragraph must develop a single idea, and that idea must
be announced near the beginning of the paragraph in a
topic sentence, and then there must be supporting sentences. Uh,
and you know, we can talk more about the prescriptive

(08:00):
idea of the paragraph later, I guess. But anyway, I
find it interesting to consider the surface level paradox that
paragraphs are absolutely essential to most modern readers. I think
you and I are probably not unique in this. Like
the prospect of reading a book or even a long
article that's just a single, unbroken block of text makes

(08:20):
my blood run cold. I could not do it. And
yet it is difficult to explain exactly what the rules
are for creating paragraphs like they're essential, but but attempts
to codify them in a universal way are, I would argue,
and I think we will argue later on pretty much

(08:40):
universally failures at at least at describing the way paragraphs
are actually used in popular writing. You know, so, questions
about where do we break the line and why are
in some ways still kind of elusive, even though breaking
the line is a must. Now. I don't know how
successful this will be, but I did at think is

(09:01):
it possible to mention favorite paragraph breaks and writing? I
was struggling to have any like Obviously, I have a
lot of bits of writing that are a paragraph, But um,
I was struggling to think of examples where the break
of the paragraph is what I admire in the writing,
as essential as it is to a piece of writing
as a whole. Yeah, I was once you brought this up.

(09:23):
I was thinking on and I'm on my own here,
and I was thinking, well, okay, what are what are
bits that stand out to me in writing? And I
found that a lot of times the things that come
to me the easiest are opening lines or sometimes closing
lines from from novels, and a lot of those A
lot of the time, if not all the time. It's
super short. It's often not even perhaps a true clinical

(09:45):
paragraph in that in that it is actually just one line.
And like a couple of examples that I instantly thought
of Dante's Inferno as a great one in them. And
of course we're getting into poetry here, we're getting into stances,
but uh, it's effectively a in tents in the middle
of the journey of our life. I came to myself
in a dark wood for the straight way was lost.

(10:06):
An even better example, and this is from an actual novel.
This is from Alan rogue Grils The Voyeur. It just
begins with a short sentence. It was as if no
one had heard. And I always loved that one because
it's so evocative, like what what is the thing that
no one had had heard? Why had they not heard it?
And who is making or what is making the sound

(10:27):
like it? It asked so many questions that I have
to keep moving. Another good one Fahrenheit four fifty one
by Ray brad Berry. It was a pleasure to burn.
Oh that's interesting, So these pros works. I've read these,
but I uh I did not recall the the opening
paragraphs being a single line. Yeah. A couple of other
ones that came to mind. Uh nearrom Answer by William Gibson.

(10:49):
The sky above the port was the color of television
turned to a dead channel. Or this is a famous
one as well, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
by Hunter S. Thompson. We were somewhere around are still
on the edge of the desert when the drugs began
to take hold. Uh yeah, that's that's another good one.
So you're a fan of the the short, possibly single
sentence opening paragraph in fiction at least? Yeah, Yeah, there's

(11:12):
something about this, like that one line. It's really they're
really either either. It really makes me think and establishes
kind of a vibe, or in some cases it establishes
a different definite setting or scenario, whether succinctly. For instance,
the Gibson one to a certain is really more about vibe.
Um the Voyeur quote is more about vibe. The Hunter S.

(11:33):
Thompson one is vibe and setting. It gives you a
sense of where we're going and sort of what is
going on. I was, obviously I'm a big fan of Dune,
so I thought, well, what was the first line of
doing I can't remember it off the top of my head.
There if you skip past the quote from from the Princess, uh,
the first line is in the week before their departure
to Aracus, when all the final scurrying about had reached

(11:56):
a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit
the mother of the boy Paul. Now that's that's not
a paragraph that I would just say, oh, I put
that on a T shirt for me, or or can
I have that inscribed in my flesh? But it is
a great, a great opening, the opening line that just
establishes exactly what is going on and gives you, you know,

(12:16):
it gives you some mystery. I guess you don't know
what Iracus is at this point, and you were instantly wondering, well,
who is this old crone? And it sets the story
and it does a good job of just just having
dived directly into the action. Really, but I couldn't remember
or just looking around really quickly find an example of
a of a multi sentence paragraph. Uh, particularly an opening

(12:39):
paragraph from a work that I held to a really
high standard. I don't know how about you, Joe. I'm
sure if I had more time thinking about this, I
could come up with good examples. But but I have not,
because again, I think paragraph breaks are essential, but I
have not scrutinized individual breaks enough that it that they
really like. Stick with me. There there's something that is essential,

(13:00):
but they mostly to me become invisible in a text.
I don't remember where the line breaks happen. Usually, Yeah,
if a paragraph is is put together effectively and it's
doing its job, you don't notice. That's one of the
things about it. Uh, it's it's it's I've never had
the experience of reading something to think, yeah, that's a
great place for a paragraph break. I might think the

(13:22):
other the opposite of that, I might think, couldn't we
have broken this up a little bit more, Um, Frank
Herbert or whoever I'm happening to read, And it's not
necessarily I was thinking about this as well, like what
is the experience of reading a text that is not
just one big breakless paragraph but has but does have
some rather expansive paragraphs. I find that sometimes when I'm

(13:45):
looking at this page, I still have a gut instinct
that it looks like work, Like you know what I'm saying, Like,
even though the thing is, if it's a book that
I'm even halfway interested in, it's not like big paragraphs
are a stumbling block to me. It's not like I
get lost in them or I'm not going to finish them.
It's not like I need to to, you know, artificially
throwing paragraph breaks from my own reading. Uh. It works

(14:07):
just fine. But there's something maybe it's like a call
back to uh, to early reading experiences, but they're sort
of that initial uh impact in my psyche where it's like,
these paragraphs are too long? What is this author doing? Oh?
This is funny though, because inserting your own paragraph breaks
in the work of an author who otherwise creates really

(14:27):
unholy chunks. Uh. This is something that some like teachers
actually do, and one specific writer I was reading for
this episode talks about doing so. One of the main
things I was reading in preparation for this was a
great essay by a scholar named Richard Hughes Gibson called
Past Lives of the Paragraph which was published in the

(14:47):
Hedgehog Review. That's an interdisciplinary culture journal based out of
the University of Virginia. And I'll refer back to this
article several times in the episode, but towards the end
of his article, Gibson tells a story about how several
years back he was um trying to prepare reading for students. Uh.

(15:08):
And this was by a critic who, uh, well, I'll
just hear read from from what Gibson writes, quote said
critic had a pension for composing labyrinthine paragraphs, which I
now realized would quickly exhaust my students. Although I felt
a tinge of compunction about tampering with those paragraphs, I
set to work and, knowing this was the only way

(15:28):
of salvaging the reading. The breaks came easily, though, and
I soon found the work enjoyable. I was seeing the
piece in a new way, and I quote discovered several
remarkable sentences that I had overlooked while navigating my way
through the labyrinths UH. And then he also says that
this did indeed make the this article much more enjoyable
for the students, and he just started doing it in

(15:50):
all his other classes. When somebody has huge paragraphs, he
would just go in and edit them to add in
paragraph breaks and you could see. So, I don't know,
an author might be mad to find out somebody was
doing that to their work, but you can also clearly
see the advantage. Yeah, yeah, it may. It does make
me wonder if there are new editions of books that
come out that that engage in this, or is it

(16:11):
considered forbidden? You know, I don't know, I'd be I'd
be very curious to hear about this. Um. I was.
When I was looking around for some other info about this,
I did run across UH a paper title but how
to write a thesis according to umberto Echo by umberto Echo,
And in it he briefly touches on the paragraph UH,

(16:33):
and he U he writes the following quote begin new paragraphs.
Often do so when logically necessary and when the pace
of the text requires it. But the more you do it,
the better. That's funny because Echo has a tendency to
write some really long paragraphs. But I mean, in his
in his defense, a lot of his long paragraphs are
full of exactly that quality of richness that I was

(16:56):
mentioning earlier, Like the long paragraphs feel substantial old, They're
full of detail and insight. Yeah. This, of course, I
was thinking about other authors that I've really loved over
the years, and I started thinking about Cormick McCarthy, of course,
who is often very succinct, especially in his later works.
So really most of his works past, like the first
novel um its Name leaves me at the moment, but

(17:19):
his first novel is a little bit denser. But but
but a lot of his later work, especially with more
recent work, is often characterized by being just you know,
very succinct short sentences, uh no quotation marks. But occasionally
you get a nice like super run on long sentence
that is essentially like a big paragraph that is almost

(17:41):
the opposite of what we're talking about here, where it
just keeps going and going, but at the same time
it has a rhythm to it and uh, an intensity
and the mere fact that it won't end is like
like it's like a crazed thought being poured directly into
your brain and you can't quite turn it off. Yeah,
long paragraphs can definitely lend themselves to a kind of obsessive,

(18:01):
immersive or stream of consciousness quality to the text. It's, uh,
you know, when you are like stuck deep in somebody
else's brain and you're not coming up for air, that
that's often going to be a long paragraph. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean it's almost like there's a conversational aspect to
paragraph breaks, like this is the amount of of text
that is occurring before the speaker pauses, has a sip

(18:23):
of their beverage. Gives you an opportunity to to think
or say something in return. But it's just that paragraph.
Then perhaps you're being preached at thank thank um, I
was thinking of I also was thinking, Okay, obviously, paragraph breaks.
I think we all agree that these are great. But

(18:45):
surely there's somebody out there who's gotten a bit experimental
and decided I will craft a work of fiction that
has no paragraph breaks. And I didn't. I don't remember
every encountering anything like this. I've certainly read books that
for instance, don't have quotation marks for dialogue, or I
think I've read books that don't have intentions on new paragraphs.

(19:06):
I'm trying to remember what this would have been. I
think it was an Anthony Burchase book, but I don't
recall I've I've certainly read books where you have, you know,
large sections written in fictional slang, it's et cetera. But
I've never encountered anything that is one massive chunk of text.
I looked around to see if such a thing existed,
and I did find some threads on like a creative

(19:27):
writing board message board where someone was like, Hey, I'm
thinking of writing something with no paragraph breaks. What does
everyone think? And uh, there were some great answers. You know,
people were like, well, I think it's gonna be hard
for folks to digest. I think it's gonna you know,
they're gonna potentially recoil from seeing that big, massive block
of text. And and so it was. It was interesting

(19:48):
because yeah, there's so many things you can you can
break and play with as a writer potentially, uh, and
and more so if you know what you're doing. But
but when it comes to the paragraph break, it does
seem there is something from the modern standpoint anyway, that
is essential about it. Yes, And I think this will
make a great transition to talking a bit about the
history of the paragraph, where paragraphs come from, because if

(20:11):
you go back far enough in in history, you're going
to find a lot of literature that is made entirely
with that block of text mentality. Man, you hate big
blocky masses of text. Look at like an ancient Greek
men you script and just feel the chill. Yeah, that's
and I was, I was looking at some of these examples,

(20:33):
and and so I couldn't help but think a lot
about the medium involved too. So like if you go
back and look at super old examples of writing that
have survived, you're looking at things like oracle bones, which
you know, often times you're dealing with with like say
the bones from a turtle, part of the shell, that
sort of thing with inscriptions on it, or you're dealing
with with like wooden strips. You see that sometimes from

(20:57):
from from from from from you know, Indian tradition. There's also,
of course the use of clay tablets, and a lot
of times you're you're you probably have to realize, okay,
this is this was relatively expensive and consumed a lot
of time and energy, So you would want to fit
as much text on one of those as possible. And
at the same time, there's only so much text you

(21:17):
could get on there, you know, like how many thoughts
could you effectively encode into an oracle bone? Um, even
if you're in even if what you're putting down is
certainly maybe not a diary entry, but it's more about
just recording figures and facts and that sort of thing. Well,
I do think a lot of the conventions of writing
might be contingent on differences between a a document scarcity

(21:43):
culture and a document rich culture, which I think we
you know, it sort of came up when we were
talking about the history of technologies for duplicating documents. Um
that you know, people just have different ways of approaching
writing when written documents or something that is expensive and
scarce versus when they're just you know, cheap to make

(22:05):
and all over the place. Yeah. So yeah, from our
modern standpoint, I was I was trying to think of
what is my relationship with paragraph breaks, and I tend
to think of it as kind of like the breath
of the text, you know, it's the fluctuating intensity of
the the author's mental process. H. And I also feel that,
you know, with a very visual mind, and and one
hone for for fiction reading by film viewing to a

(22:27):
large degree, I think, you know, like I was viewing
films and viewing TV before I was reading, and and
so to a certain extent, the paragraph breaks are also
sort of like stage direction, like look at this, now,
look at this, and they can help drive home shifts
in tone, intensity and character and so forth. Um. So it's,
you know, from our modern standpoint, the format is part

(22:48):
of the signal. Strip the format away, and the signal
is degraded, like that big block of text. If you
take any given work, um, you know, you take up it. Certainly,
if you take something like got any of the books
that we've discussed so far, uh, and you take all
the paragraph breaks out, it's not going to be the same,
because it's like the breath patterns of the voice speaking

(23:09):
to you are altered. Uh. But what if the text
is written in such a way that the characters, the symbols,
and the words alone are the signal. How do you
denote shifts in subject matter? How do you do the
things that paragraph breaks do? Uh. And and and also
like where, where and how does that emerge out of
our written language traditions? Yeah, and to imagine documents where

(23:35):
the signal is really just the sequence of the characters,
like the letters in the words. A great thing to
look at is actual ancient Greek and Roman documents. Uh.
These things used to often be written on papyrus scrolls,
So remember these would not be books like ours with
flippable pages. The format with flippable pages like we used

(23:55):
today is called a codex. The scroll is the one
continuous sheet, and text on the scrolls of papyrus was
generally written until until more like in the medieval period
in a method called scriptio continua. And this means there
is no punctuation between sentences and there are no spaces

(24:17):
between words. No spaces between words is up to you
to figure out where one word stops in another one starts. Uh.
They don't have punctuation between sentences, and they very likely
don't have paragraph breaks, but there might be something in
there to signal some kind of transition to help you out. Now,

(24:39):
is this as as this was a written language of symbols,
what did we do when we turn to symbols? To
denote these shifts. I was initially reading about this in
the Origin of the Pill Crow a k A the
Strange paragraph symbol by Jimmy Stamp for Smithsonian in and
Stamp rights that if we go back to around two CE,
we'd find paragraphs quote unquote which could loosely be understood

(25:04):
as changes in topics, speaker, or stanza that were separated
by various symbols that scribes had developed independently out of
the need for such breaks, but without any kind of
top down consistency. So, uh, the you know, scribes here
in this part of Europe might be using one thing.
Over here they're using another thing, just different traditions. Uh,

(25:26):
different symbols emerging Stamp rights quote. Some used unfamiliar symbols
that can't easily be translated into a typed blog post.
Some used something as simple as a single line, while
other used the K for caput for the Latin word
for head. Languages change spellings evolved, and by the twelfth
century scribes abandoned the K in favor of the C

(25:48):
for capitula little head to divide text into capitula, also
known as chapters. Like the treble cleft, the pill crow
evolved due to the inconsistencies inherent in hand drawing. As
it became more widely used, the c gained a vertical
line in keeping with the latest rubrication trends and other
more elaborate embellishments, eventually becoming the character scene at the

(26:11):
top of this post. And the character in question is
the pill crow, which you can you can all look
look this up if you're not envisioning it already. It's
this curious, slightly ornate symbol that looks kind of like
a backwards P with a with a stalk made out
of two vertical lines, and the hollow of the P

(26:31):
is often filled in, so that's solid. Does that Does
that seem like a reasonable um description of this strange symbol. Yeah,
It's the thing that I remember first seeing when I
was like trying to edit documents in an early version
of Microsoft Word and I accidentally clicked some setting where
suddenly every line break had one of these, and I

(26:52):
was like, ah, how do I make them go away? Uh?
But in fact, it used to be quite common for say,
medieval manuscripts to be full of these symbols. Yeah. Yeah,
And indeed, indeed, I think most of modern readers are
going to be familiar with this from doing the same thing,
clicking on the wrong thing in the word processor and
seeing all the pill crows, seeing all the little machine

(27:13):
oils that are making paragraph breaks possible. Um. I think
there are also some some modern legal and academic writing
uses of the pill crow. But but it's you know,
it's used in web publishing, it's used in proofreading. But
it has this origin in just a way to break
up thoughts. Yes, And so strangely enough, the word paragraph

(27:36):
though now the word refers to a chunk of text itself.
The word actually comes from the Greek originally paragraphos, which
means written beside, you know, to right beside something. And
that comes from the fact that originally paragraph breaks come
from this practice of making some kind of mark in

(27:58):
the margin of a document. So you'd have like a
papyrus scroll, it's just got this big, unbroken chunk of
letters just marching down the page. And the way you
signal some kind of transition. And as you said, Rob,
it wasn't consistent. It wasn't like there were, you know,
stable rules for when you use the paragraph as and

(28:18):
when you don't. It just means something is changing here.
Maybe it's a change a new sentence begins on this line,
or maybe it's that there's a change in speakers in
a drama or a philosophical dialogue or something, or change
of topic. It's just something is different here. And originally
that's this line, just like a dash in the margin,

(28:39):
and then over time it changes into these letters you're
talking about, like the K or the C in in
Latin manuscripts, and then eventually the C gets these bars
and it becomes the pill crow. But I think this
is all originally derived from this paragraph as marker. Just
the dash in the margin says something's different now. Yeah, yeah,
this this post I was looking at by Amp. He's

(29:01):
citing Keith Houston's Shady Characters, The Secret the Secret Life
of punctuation symbols and other typographical marks, and it gets
into like basically the the death of the pill Crow.
Where does the pill Crow go? And it's actually a
pretty interesting story because basically what ends up happening in
the medieval period is the ring used more and more,

(29:24):
but then they start to sort of vanish in the
late medieval period, and the main reason is that you
have texts being copied, uh, you know, that was how
you reproduce texts, as we've discussed in the show before.
And you had these pill crows which had become increasingly
artistic and ornamental in nature. And when you had things

(29:47):
like that in a manuscript that was being copied, well,
somebody else had to come back in and add those
in later. You just had to leave a space for them. Um.
And that's uh, that's the job that would fall to
the rubricators. They'd be the ones that come back in
and add the read ink or other special effects that
need to be a part of this you know, illuminated
manuscript that's being copied. That's that's actually where their name

(30:09):
comes from. Rubric is from the Latin meaning red, So
like the word rubric is derived from the idea of
a heading in a document that might be written and
read because of these these people, the rubricators, who are
using red ink. Yeah, they It sounds kind of nefarious,
doesn't it, the rubricators. Um, I wonder if anyone has
has used that in a nefarious fashion and in some

(30:32):
sort of strange fiction before the Red Letterman. But but anyway, Yeah,
so you have all these these these blanks that have
to be left when you're copying the manuscripts. And the
thing is is the world piles up sometimes that the
rubrication doesn't get done, those those spaces remain in the
Finnish text. And then this carries on apparently when we

(30:55):
get to the advent of the printing press as well.
Early printed books were printed with spaces for hand drawn
effects such as pill crows. So you know, you're you're
using the adjustable typeface, you're using the you know, the
block letters, and all your printing stuff out, but then
somebody needs to come back in and add that pill crow,
and sometimes they don't. Uh and and certainly this became

(31:15):
the case as demand grew, rubricators couldn't keep up, and
the pill crow dies out, but the spaces for the
pill crow remain. It's almost like if you go into
an old house and they still have the like the
little nook for a rotary phone. Have you been in
one of these show, Yeah, yeah, So it's like that
that technology is obsolete now, but the space where it

(31:36):
went it still remains. So what began as a kind
of vaguely defined punctuation mark that would be in the
margin beside a column of text, eventually becomes a more
sort of inline punctuation mark, and then eventually just becomes
a space in the line, a line break in an indentation. Yeah,

(32:02):
I just wanted to add one more interesting thing about
the the old school paragraph as mark in like a
Greek in Latin manuscripts. This is from that article by
Gibson that I mentioned earlier. So Gibson points out that
scholars believe that in many or most cases, these marks
in the documents cannot be traced back to the original author. Instead,

(32:25):
they are usually something that would be added to a text,
either by a reader or by a scribe or editor
making a copy of a text. Because remember, in the
ancient world there was no printing press. Books had to
be copied by hand. And we can tell that the
paragraphs marks were probably added at some point after the
original author, because sometimes they appear in different places in

(32:47):
different copies of the same document. And so I think
it's interesting to think about paragraph breaks as being in
a way descended from something that wasn't encoded as a
part of the text at the author's discretion, but at
say a copyists discretion or at the reader's discretion, they
might make these marks themselves on their own copy of

(33:09):
the document for their own reading convenience. Gibson also talks
about how so for like the cultural descendants of Greek
and Roman rhetoric and composition, the scriptio continuous system, the
one where it's just this block of of marching letters
that goes straight down the scroll in a column. Uh,
that that came apart for several reasons in the medieval period.

(33:33):
One thing that Gibson draws attention to is the switch
from the scroll to the codex. Uh. You know, the
codex again is like modern day books, but with back
then they would have often been with pages made out
of animal skins. And this change in medium brought about
a number of different ways of thinking about a text
and how it's presented to a reader. There's also Gibson

(33:54):
refers to a switch to what paleographer Mby Parks calls
a quote grammar of legibility around the eighth and ninth centuries.
So it seems like you've got a lot of people
with sort of middling literacy participating in the copying and
reading of documents, like you know, monks and uh and

(34:16):
people within the Carolingian Renaissance. Uh. Basically they were trying
to come up with new ways of writing that would
make texts easier to read, especially if your language and
literacy skills are not top notch. And so there are
a number of legibility innovations in writing. One example would
be the introduction of lower case scripts. You have capital

(34:40):
letters and lower case letters to help help organize the
words you're looking at. And the other big one is
spaces between words thank god uh. And in this period,
Gibson writes that medieval scribes also continued the tradition of
of and identifying transitions of one kind or another subsections

(35:01):
within text with that paragraphs marker. And then it's in
in this literary tradition that the paragraph of marker goes
through all these um, you know, morphing into different letters
and then eventually becomes the pill crow, which then eventually
in the technological sphere of the printing press uh in
some cases, and then in most cases just becomes blank space. Yeah.

(35:22):
And I found it interesting to thinking about this, like
going from from from the initial you know, the initial
transformation from from using these uh these hand copied text
to using the printing press but still holding onto things
like uh like hand drawn illustrations, hand drawn um pill
crows and so forth. It made me think about what

(35:42):
happens when we do when we shift to a new
technology or a new medium. I think another example, this
is one we've touched on the show before, is by
going increasingly going to PDFs and in electronic texts. Essentially
that's more in line with the scroll. There doesn't need
to be page break page to page, and I think,
you know, viewing wise, you don't have to have one

(36:04):
if you don't want one. But I know, from my part,
I want those those page breaks in there, like something
feels weird organizationally weird, even on electronic text which I
use all the time, especially for work. And but but
I feel like there needs to I need to feel
like I'm looking at a digital version of a physical
page in a physical book rather than the sort of

(36:26):
of of endless stream that it actually is. Well, yeah,
and sometimes you would have to wonder like is it
actually arbitrary which elements of composition, which like structural elements
of composition are preserved across different media, and which are
not so uh when you read an e book, they
almost always are going to keep the author's original paragraph breaks, right,

(36:50):
It's not going to rearrange what's a paragraph or make
shorter paragraphs or something, But the original page breaks are
of no concern at all. In fact, probably even you know,
the original printing of that book may have had different
page breaks than whatever form the author composed it in,
whether on a typewriter or handwritten or whatever. And so
we've just decided that, well, the page needs to look

(37:11):
the same in terms of where the paragraphs are broken,
but not it does not need to look the same
in terms of where the pages are broken. And I
see no reason where why like it would have to
be that way, you know, But even that, I have
to admit, seems a little wrong at times, Like I
don't know if this is everyone else's experience, but when
I'm reading books on my kindle um, I'll skip to
the next page, and sometimes I'll come back or you know,

(37:32):
accidentally turn the page and I'll turn back, and I'll
notice that now the page break occurs at a different
spot in the text, And that feels really wrong to me,
and I feel even though there's no I don't think
there's any way you could have that uniform, especially when
you have the luxury of being able to change the
size of the fond on the screen and so forth.
But it feels weird that I shouldn't have internal consistency

(37:56):
regarding when a page ends and when it begins. Yeah, totally.
I mean that I think we have expectations established on
the basis of physical printed books where you know, that
just doesn't change. Right. I'm not saying it messes me up,
it really business me off or anything, but it's just
something I casually notice as I'm reading. It's like, what
now the page ends on this paragraph? Well, this also

(38:17):
makes me think about something Gibson mentions in this essay,
which is uh, he writes, quote, Medieval readers and writers
were thus increasingly attentive to the visual appearance of the
page and as a and as a result, recognize the
paragraph significant place within it. So it's sort of in
the medieval period that the paragraph becomes an important part

(38:38):
of reading. Uh. And I was thinking about this. You know,
I have a lay person's perspective on this, so I
don't know if this is a good insight, but I
was at least wondering. Okay, so you look at like
medieval practices of producing highly decorated texts with you know,
beautiful lettering and calligraphy, illustrations and illuminations and so forth.

(38:58):
It seems to me you find a lot less of
that in earlier texts. You like, if you look at
copies of the same books from centuries earlier, for example
the Bible. Uh, the earlier copies, there often seems to
be no attempt whatsoever to improve the aesthetic qualities of
the copy. It's more like the scroll is just a
purely utilitarian storage medium for the text of the book. Uh,

(39:22):
So that you know, wouldn't be otherwise lost or forgotten,
and it would probably often be used for being read aloud.
Then you again, take the same text and look at
a medieval manuscript, it might be gorgeous in some way.
So it seems possible that the modern concept of the
paragraph emerges from a time of more literary luxury, when
there's a greater emphasis on making manuscripts themselves aesthetically pleasing.

(39:48):
All right, Rob and I were just talking off Mike
and we decided we have to admit defeat by time
where we we had more to talk about, we didn't
get to it yet. So this is going to become
a two part episode. Yeah, maybe it'll give any time
to find that actual perfect paragraph from some book I love.
I'll look around, maybe something will pop out at me.
All right, we'll join us next time as we continue
this discussion, but go ahead and right in. We'd love

(40:09):
to hear from you if you have thoughts about the
paragraph as we've discussed it thus far. Core episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind published Tuesdays and Thursdays, and
the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed We are
primarily a science podcast, and those are the primarily science episodes.
On Monday's we do a listener mail, on Wednesdays we
do short form artifact or monster Fact, and on Friday's

(40:31):
we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent
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(40:56):
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