A few professional editing thoughts on paragraph length

You would never serve your guests a whole cake without slicing it. Do not serve weighty ideas without slicing them up, either.
Plenty of writers, whether it is a report or an e-mail to clients or colleagues, simply spill all their ideas onto the page, and expect their readers to divide, categorize, and understand those ideas. This is not reasonable. If you want people to enjoy your cake or your ideas, present them beautifully instead of as a raw chunk.
Over my decades of editing I have heard plenty of "rules" about paragraphs, usually going back to things that school teachers said to young children in a desperate attempt to get more words out of their little writing hands. These false ideas include, but are not limited to, the following:
  • paragraphs need a beginning, middle, and end
  • paragraphs must be at least three sentences
  • repeat your topic sentence at the end.
None of those are true for adult writing, and particularly not in the internet age! Redefine what you think paragraph breaks are.
Paragraph breaks are a way to create white space surrounding your important ideas.
If you write something that is not important, well, can you delete it? If not, then it can go in the middle of a paragraph. But your important ideas should show up at the beginning of paragraphs.
Readers of long documents and articles now will often spend mere minutes on articles, and skim the first lines of each paragraph to distill the ideas before going to the next item on their busy to-do list.
That is how reading happens now that we are used to the internet. There's no point in fighting against it, that's just how it is. If you bury something in the middle of a paragraph, it probably will not get read.
This is essential for technical reports, because you need your clients to access your important points.
It is also true of modern novels. I can tell a self-published novel these days by (among other things) the lengths of the paragraphs -- most fiction readers these days are not willing to wade through Dickensian 12-sentence paragraphs. And why should we? Make the read more pleasurable by breaking things up. (Aside: If you are going to self-publish and not hire an editor, consider at least comparing your novel to reading you like, to learn how to improve your own.)
Experiment for yourself. Take a look at some of your favourite new reads and compare it to something old -- huge difference.
Even more than the words you use, the space you put on the page affects comprehension.

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