Handbooks on writing, particularly traditional ones explaining expository prose, will often say that a final document is just an assemblage of individual paragraphs. In the same way that a sentence puts words together to build a thought, so a paragraph puts sentences together to ramify a number of such sentence-thoughts. By definition, each paragraph is designed around one overarching thought called its topic sentence. Each paragraph thereby is to enjoy its own unity, and the entire collection of such unified paragraphs produces the final document, sometimes called a universe of discourse.
Guiding this discursive elaboration which is a paragraph, then, is the principle of unity. Remarkably, unity, or wholeness, is almost gravitationally attractive to the human mind, indeed we might say almost metaphysically so, for its synonym wholeness is related etymologically to the nouns holy, healthy, and hale. What is whole, or unified, then, is one and entire, and being one it is not in conflict with all its differentiations, just as the branches of a tree are not opposed to, but arise from, their central stem. Unity is achieved, in other words, when no part of a whole stands out alone. But at the same time, unity is not a monotony, one thing tediously repeating itself over and over again. The unity, or wholeness, we seem to crave is one thing made up of many things, all in harmony with one another, and that is why we can call the artistic and philosophical principle of unity a true center, or universe, or cosmos.
The literary critic Helen Gardner, in her collected lectures entitled The Business of Criticism, maintained that something well written “appeals through my senses and imagination to my capacity to recognize order and harmony and to be delighted by them.” Where there is order there is harmony, and where there is harmony there is unity, and our delight, our satisfaction come in abiding at such a center of recognition. Careful writers, like all careful artists, must be critics of their own work as they are working, and if the paragraph is really the compounding unit of a document, then it is worth our time to learn how to compose one with design and purpose.
Since we can always learn by observing, let’s consider an example of a well-crafted paragraph on the ever timely topic of gardening. Jeremy Naydler, a contemporary British writer, philosopher, and gardener, has written this tightly designed paragraph where we can see how the limbs of a theme grow nicely from its topic sentence. This passage appears in his beautifully thoughtful meditation Gardening as a Sacred Art:
Today, therefore, two fundamental tendencies can be discerned in the approach people take to gardening. Many people feel that the possession of a garden gives them not only the opportunity but also the right to impress their own designs upon the little bit of nature that has become their responsibility. Such designs will express their own or their family’s needs and desires, and thereby they feel the garden’s main purpose is fulfilled. For others, however, the garden provides an opportunity to attune to nature, and to follow nature’s lead in matters of garden management and aesthetics. If we think in this way, then it is not simply a question of impressing our own designs on nature, but rather of working with the spirit of the place so as to bring it to fuller expression through the decisions that we make.
The first of the five sentences which comprise this paragraph states the topic: people approach gardening in two fundamental ways. The topic sentence will often appear first in a paragraph to announce the forthcoming unity of thoughts, although theoretically it may appear in the middle or even at the end. This topic has the advantage of asserting quantity—two fundamental tendencies—and that will make it easier for us to track the paragraph’s development and evaluate its design.
The second sentence refers to many people, and sets up that subject to represent the first of the two approaches to gardening: those who wish to impress their own designs upon nature. Sentence three then states the results of such an active relationship of gardener acting on garden. But this subject phrase many people is meant to stand in contrast to the subsequent phrase for others, which begins sentence four. There then begins a discussion of the second of the two tendencies named in the topic sentence. Unlike many people, these others take a passive stand before nature, wishing to follow its lead and not their own. The final, fifth sentence extends this second gardening characteristic to its ultimate consequence, working with the spirit of the place.
The structure of Naydler’s paragraph could not be more architectonically constructed: it begins with the unifying idea, and then names the two parts in sentences two and four, each then branching out further by one sentence. Thus we could schematize the structure as A, B, B, C, C. The result is a pleasing—because intelligible—design which both fulfills and secures the primary principle of unity. One venerated old manual of writing, Scott and Denney’s Paragraph-Writing, succinctly defines the paragraph as “a unit of discourse developing a single idea,” and we can see that Naydler achieved that in his construction of this paragraph.
Naydler’s own sympathies apparently lie with those others who wish to stand more attentively before nature, for he refers again in the concluding paragraph of his work to “making a deliberate effort to re-attune ourselves to the spiritual qualities that infuse the sensory world that surrounds us” and become “creatively engaged with this more inward and hidden dimension of nature through our gardening.” Whether we call such a dimension spiritual, philosophical, or metaphysical, one indeed might say the same of our creative work in reading and writing, which, as Naydler says of the garden, “beckons us toward the necessary counterbalance and corrective to a consciousness that seems bent on veering away from the real.” If so, language will hold a preeminent place for us all.
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