What are we after when we want to write a well-crafted paragraph? Cynically we might answer, just to get it done!, but when we have something we really want to say to the world, we inevitably care about how well we say it: we want to be taken seriously and we don’t want to be misunderstood.
But what does well-written mean, and how do we know when we’ve achieved it? We might profitably look for help in answering those questions by turning to the traditional standards of art and art criticism, which appeal to the way the natural world takes shape. A British teacher and designer, N. I. Cannon, wrote in 1948 a manual entitled Pattern and Design, and there she enumerated thirteen such principles, among them unity, contrast, and symmetry.
To see what this might mean in the art of writing a paragraph, let’s look at a passage from Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1949). Highet was a classical scholar, but also a teacher and public lecturer, and so he was aware of the shapes and patterns his sentences had to take in order to meet his objective of clear, persuasive, untechnical language. Here he is speaking of how English first began to take shape:
The story of English prose literature during the Dark Ages is also the story of the much-interrupted upward struggle of civilization in the British islands. Poetry nearly always looks backwards, in form or matter or both, to an earlier age. Prose is more contemporary, reflecting the needs and problems and powers of its time. Therefore English prose literature in this period was primarily educational. Its intention was to civilize the British, to keep them civilized, and to encourage them in the struggle against the constantly recurring attacks of barbarism. To do this it used two chief instruments. One was the Bible and Christian doctrine. The other was classical culture. There was nothing frivolous, no fiction or fancy, about English prose in this era. It was resolutely religious, or historical, or philosophical.
The principle of unity is first and all-important in any artistic production. Unity means oneness—the absence of confusion, not the absence of difference—and in a paragraph, that means that every sentence must arise as an organic part of a main stem, or trunk, or central idea which the paragraph wants to address. This central idea is called the topic or thesis, and in Highet’s paragraph, the first sentence tells us that he will be saying something about English prose in the Dark Ages (both these ideas mentioned in the subject of this topic sentence) and the difficult development (he names it an upward struggle) of civilization in the British islands (mentioned in the predicate). Those ideas constitute a contract he has now signed with the reader, and we can test whether he has achieved the principle of unity by asking whether each of the subsequent nine sentences grows as a limb or branch or twig (each derivative of the last) from that main trunk.
The subject of the second sentence is poetry, and we might conclude too quickly that Highet has already introduced a new idea and thereby violated the principle of unity. But unity encompasses opposition, or contrast, another of the principles Cannon identifies, and saying something about what prose does not do—that it does not look to the past, like poetry, but to the present—stabilizes the structure Highet is raising in the way one branch of a tree will grow opposite another to balance the ascending height. The subject of the third sentence returns to the central idea of prose, the fourth expands that idea into its result (therefore educational), and the fifth ramifies the idea of developing prose into its purpose (to civilize).
With the sixth sentence, we move from these branches to the limbs, the means whereby this civilizing purpose of English prose was accomplished. The author says that two instruments got the job done: he names the Bible and Christian doctrine as one in sentence seven, and classical culture as the other in sentence eight. These three sentences together illustrate the principle of symmetry, which Cannon defines as “the equal balance of weight, shape or form about a central axis.” This axis is laid down with the claim in sentence six that we must look to a pair of instruments, and then on both sides of that axis, in sentences seven and eight, Highet states the two means, each in a simple sentence whose predicate names the instrument. That equal syntactical weight hangs level from the fulcrum of sentence six (also a grammatically simple sentence), and the resulting structure makes it easy and pleasing to follow the author’s claim.
The remaining sentences we could call the outer twigs of the paragraph’s thesis, a flourish to explain that the historical work of developing English prose was taken seriously, even religiously so. Without saying it directly, Highet is intimating at the conclusion of his paragraph that the study and practice of English are worth the time and effort, preserving and advancing the work of civilization, or what is more classically called the humane tradition. Indeed.
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