Regina Brett

If you want to lose 40 pounds, you order salad instead of fries. If you want to be a better friend, you take the phone call instead of screening it. If you want to write a novel, you sit down and write a single paragraph. It's scary to make major changes, but we usually have enough courage to take the next right step.

American Journalist

Jeff Daniels

And that's one thing that helps me is I learn it blandly, vanilla, then I don't try to act it too soon because you start to act it, and you kind of go away from what the next sentence is, what the next paragraph is. So get it down so it kind of can - it's in there so you can then, as I call it, dance on top of it.

American Actor

Ali Smith

We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.

Scottish Writer

Cynthia Ozick

In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.

American Novelist

Adam Ross

I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work.

Dave Heineman

I'll get a three-page letter and the last paragraph says 'I know you'll never read this, but here's my number.' I love to call those people because the first thing they say is, 'Governor, I didn't mean everything I said in the letter about you.

American Politician

Chaim Potok

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

American Author

Randy Wayne White

The written word is the only anchor we have in life. How extraordinary would it be if we had even three or four paragraphs written honestly about their lives by our ancestors?

American Writer

Nancy Kress

The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.

Edan Lepucki

I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.

Paragraphs organize writing by grouping related sentences, making your text easier to understand.

Coherent Structure

Each paragraph should focus on one main idea, which is usually introduced in the first sentence.

Unity of Idea

Use words like 'however', 'furthermore', and 'meanwhile' to connect paragraphs and flow smoothly.

Transition Signals

The paragraph symbol (¶) is rarely used today except in legal documents, editing, and note-taking.

Paragraph Symbol

Instead of symbols, modern writing uses line breaks and indentation to mark new paragraphs.

Formatting

Use a paragraph when summarizing to convey a lot of information compactly.

Concise Summary

Even a short paragraph should clearly communicate a complete thought or idea.

Clarity in Brief

Paraphrasing helps present your thoughts sequentially and makes your writing more digestible.

Organized Thoughts

Use paragraphing to separate dialogue or to highlight key points in a narrative.

Narrative Clarity

 into an appreciation of all of those qualities of language and of sentences that are not just the cognitive aspects of the syncopations, the sounds of words, what words look like, where paragraphs break, where lines break. I mean, I wasn't so badly dyslexic that I was disabled from reading. I just had to do it

4 Lessons in Creativity...

 First paragraph, the main character wakes up transformed into a giant cockroach, but we already know, cockroach notwithstanding, something is up with this guy. Why? His alarm is set for four o'clock in the morning. What kind of person would do that? This kind of person would do that.

Rives: The Museum of...

 so long that they've forgotten what a stable is and of course I had to turn around and tell him that the stable that my horses had never been in a stable in their life and if I if you don't mind I just like to read you one paragraph from my book about what I thought about that

Tim Cope: On the Trail...

 Now, I know some of you are thinking, global capital markets, positive social change, not usually in the same sentence or even the same paragraph. I think many people think of the capital markets kind of like an ocean. It's a vast, impersonal, uncaring force of nature

How to make a profit...

 to read it all it's kind of hard material to get through I just wanted them to scroll through and get a sense of the carnage taking place in their country every day soon I began to see patterns shootings multiplied over the weekend resulting in paragraph after

Gun violence as told by...

 communicating with naturalist all over the world but by post which took weeks to meet different people and to produce at the end this very beautifully written book the last paragraph of this book you know is is a great piece of literature

Sir David Attenborough...

 of an encyclopedia of life, or the census of marine life, will live not just as a list, a photograph, or a paragraph. With scientists around the world, I've been looking at the 99 percent of the ocean

Sylvia Earle: How to...

 cows or chickens protected areas provide hope that the creatures of ed Wilson's dream of an encyclopedia of life or the census of marine life will live not just as a list a photograph or a paragraph

TED Prize wish: Protect...

 College, me? Man, what is this teacher smoking thinking I'm going to college? I applied with the mentors and support she provided, got a letter of acceptance, and one of the paragraphs read,

Help for kids the...

 Sure you were, because you've prepared your entire life for this historic quadrennial event that just sort of sneaks up on you. And then -- three paragraphs later we get this little