A Great Bit of Advice from a Great Book Designer

Ever thought about paragraphs?

Well, with DIY publishing gaining popularity, you might want to consider what the Reader needs to make their reading easier…

There have been many kinds of paragraphing over time and one can actually think of paragraphs as a type of “punctuation”.

As I sometimes do in this blog, I looked up the etymology of the word “paragraph”:

“‘…sign for start of a new section of discourse (the sign looked something like a stylized letter -P-)…” — “short stroke in the margin marking a break in sense” — “anything written beside, from paragraphein ‘write by the side’, from para- ‘beside’ + graphein ‘to write’.”

¶ <<< That’s the symbol that’s sometimes used to indicate a paragraph. And, here’s a link that shows 12 different styles of paragraphs…

If you’d rather read an article that deals with only the most common ways of showing paragraphs, try Joel Friedlander’s, Book Design: Choosing Your Paragraphing Style.

Here are two brief excerpts:

“Paragraphs long ago became a standard device for organizing the ideas in a book or the flow of a story. When the writer creates a paragraph, it breaks the flow of text and sends an important signal to the reader.”

“Reading on-screen is vastly different from reading a printed book, and a new default style has arisen out of the needs of readers of all this electronic text.”

I’d also urge you to read the Comments Joel got :-)

Oh! For those who’ve never noticed the ¶ , here’s Wikipedia’s take on defining what’s called a Pilcrow.
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