Tips For Writing a Good Paragraph - Why You Need to Adjust the Length For Different Media

Words, sentences, and paragraphs. These are the main building blocks for a writer. Ultimately all types of writing stem from and are composed of these three core elements and structures. Writing a paragraph is an important skill when writing your book. If you don't write paragraphs well, you can't possibly write anything larger well. A writer's skill is measured by how well he or she can manipulate the three building blocks into a flowing narrative. A book, an article, a speech, an anthology...they all come back to those three lonely building blocks.

It's important that anyone who wishes to be a writer first becomes a master at writing paragraphs. In this article, I'm going to address one characteristic that constantly changes when a good paragraph is written -- the length. More particularly I'm going to address why different media require different lengths in paragraphs. Of course, within any one media paragraphs will vary in length. That's part of what keeps the writing interesting. If you only ever wrote one length of paragraph your writing would sound stilted and boring. And your reader would easily lose their place and find it difficult to pick up again.

But even though the sizes of individual paragraphs vary there is a general trend that can be identified with different media for your books. A paragraph in a digital book is always shorter than a paragraph in a traditional printed book. And a paragraph in a popular length (or executive length) book is always shorter than that in a text book.

But why?

The answer has to do with readability and the target reader. Digital books or eBooks have traditionally been harder to read than a traditional book. Not only do you need to sit at a computer to read them, but the page size seldom matches the screen size. And the print is much harder to read. Either it's much smaller than a book or it's much larger and less clear. Pieces of letters disappear and become lost in the glare of the white screen.

Even the new crop of eBook digital readers has not solved that problem. On the other hand a traditionally printed book is a joy to hold and read from. The font is usually crisp and easy to read. The book is portable and can be carried to where the lighting is much better. As a result, writing for the digital market needs to adjust to the difficulty of reading in that media. In short it needs to be simpler to read.

The same thing applies to an executive book and a university textbook. An executive doesn't have a great deal of time. They need to be able to read a book quickly and determine if they are going to spread the information. In short, they too need the writing to be minimized. An executive book needs its paragraphs to be as simple and easy to read as possible. For a paragraph that means that the paragraph needs to be as short and simple as possible.