What is a Paragraph?
A paragraph is a group of sentences within a piece of writing, essay or article. Each paragraph contains a series of related sentences that describe one idea or subject. For a new idea or subject, a separate paragraph is made.
What is Paragraph Length?
Paragraph length tells you how long a block of text in a piece of writing. The length is measured by the number of words, number of letters or number of lines.
What is the Ideal Paragraph Length?
There are no rules on how long or short a paragraph should be. A paragraph is a group of related sentences, related because they give a continuous description or exposition of the same idea or topic. A writer can take as many or as few sentences as it takes to write about it adequately.
Generally, paragraphs shouldn’t be so long that they are tiresome to read. Human eyes get tired this way. Nor should paragraphs be so short that they confuse the reader.
But there are instances where you have to conform to certain standards even at the cost of your writing style. To give an example, internet article writing has to be very brief. Articles on the web are rarely read in their entirety. And the longer the paragraphs are, the greater the likelihood that they will lose a person’s attention. So in the interest of making them readable, web articles should be shorter than what’s normally found in books.
Other cases where you may need to adjust paragraph length is when using an article engine or when editing a newspaper article. Article engines may leave headers orphaned or format paragraphs awkwardly . So you need to shorten or lengthen blocks of text to make it look good. Newspaper articles must fit within space limitations, so again editing is necessary.
How Many Paragraphs in One Article?
There is no formula for the number of paragraphs in an article. But essays and articles will need at least three parts: the opening, the middle and the end. You need at least three paragraphs then. The first introduces the subject and tries to lead one to read the rest of the article. The middle describes the article’s subject. The last paragraph summarizes what was written or suggests an idea to the reader connected with the article subject.
Paragraph length guidelines are there only as that—guidelines. When you know your subject well, the writing flows naturally and you will know when to obey the standards and when not to.