Perhaps along with other American Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson is not a writer whose paragraphs are considered models of structured composition. His sentences, though, are another matter. Robert Richardson, in his First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process, declares that “for Emerson the sentence—not the paragraph and not the essay—is the main structural and formal unit,” and that this preoccupation “steered him away from narrative, from logic, from continuity, from formal arrangement and effect.” One can understand, then, the reluctance of writing teachers to hold up Emerson’s extended prose as an exemplar of formal paragraph construction.

But all the thought that was in those sentences! Richardson continues:

When his sentences work, which is often enough, his success can be traced to his taking endless pains with sentence mechanics. He liked sentences that had a little bite or pop, a flash-point, and he had several different ways of achieving this effect, which we may distinguish as the whip-crack, the back-flip, the brass ring (hole in one), and the mousetrap.

Richardson goes on to give an example of each type from Emerson’s writings: “Every man is wanted, but no man is wanted much” (the whip-crack, where the final position snaps the idea); “Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing” (the back-flip, where an unexpected logic is displayed); “Hitch your wagon to a star” (the brass ring, where an idea sounds its profundity); and “Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can” (the mousetrap, where the sentence catches an idea whole).

Yet for all that, it was the poet, not the prose writer, whom Emerson thought truly representative of the nature of human nature, because our prose sentences, even his, are still after the fact of the poet’s vision. In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson says:

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.

So finely organized. Hours could be spent on the implications of that phrase alone. Organized administratively, as in well planned? Surely not. Organized as integrated, whole, organically cognate with? Perhaps we’re closer to his meaning there. Rich human depths to reflect upon. Robert Richardson’s short study of Emerson, still available, has much to say about reading and writing and language and poetry and art. He has written, as well, a biography of Emerson (Emerson: The Mind on Fire), and a biography too of Emerson’s worthy contemporary Thoreau (Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind). Perhaps the one unanticipated lesson Emerson will teach us is how to savor the long, slow time it takes to read and ponder him. Much like a long, slow, savory meal with a friend whose insight we’ve come to rely upon.

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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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The word seems to have gotten out that writing is just a lot like talking: we should be able to do it without much thinking, and if we can’t, then we should try to write as we speak. Something, let’s hope, will come together. That is a grand illusion, and if we follow that assumption, we can find ourselves hovering over a blank screen or a clean piece of white paper with nothing to say for a very long time. The magic we need to make the mute speak is design, and as the artist and teacher N. I. Cannon wrote many years ago in her vastly suggestive book Pattern and Design, a plan will call out in order the ideas we have in mind:

The true meaning of design is not only ornament or decoration, but rather the order or plan on which any work of art is constructed. Good art is not the result of accident, but of clear logical thought combined with the artist’s vision and inspiration. It is good when based on the sound basic principles of order and unity and bad when there is a conflict of interests which  produces disorder.

Cannon goes on to name and define thirteen such basic principles, four having to do with relation (unity, proportion, relation, and harmony), four more to do with disrelation (discord, contrast, domination, and subordination), and another four to do with consonancy (symmetry, asymmetry, duality, and balance). The thirteenth principle is rhythm, which, she says, is “closely linked with emotion and the artist’s idea. Only by using the principles of design with rhythm and emotion can there be life and movement, without which all art must be dead.”

If we take language seriously—reading it closely and writing it carefully—each of us is an artist, because we are working to conform our ideas with their adequate expression. Cannon maintains that “it is in nature that we find the fundamental origin of the principles of design,” and that artists will use these principles “to interpret their ideas into a unified whole.” And when something is unified, it has integrity and is intelligible.

Still the best introductory guide to English composition I know of is Thomas Kane’s New Oxford Guide to Writing, 1994. And with it, Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, 1995, and then Edward P. J. Corbett’s more advanced Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 1990. Any one of these (and many others) will explain the principles and craft to the end Cannon outlines. Then it’s time for practice. And reading. And practice and reading. And practice and reading….

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What does it mean to think something through? If I have a list of expenses I need to total for the month, thinking about that problem means gathering the relevant data and adding each accurately to the next. This kind of thinking we call calculating or computing, finding the always and necessary connection of facts, numerical or otherwise. But we don’t usually refer to thinking through a calculation, because the adverb through suggests a wider field of observations which could affect our conclusion. This kind of thinking through we instead call reasoning.

Understanding the difference between calculating and reasoning is especially important in our present days of universal access to omnipresence. Each of us is a computer connection away from claiming the attention of an astronomical number of persons, and if we the audience do not listen carefully to what others are telling us—if we do not think through what they often passionately and brashly are asserting, we risk handing away that priceless gemstone which is our own mind and identity. Reasoning is more than logic. Where logic calculates, reason considers, ponders, contemplates—that frame of mind we assume when we study, for example, the great display of stars in the night sky. Curiously, the verb consider originally meant to watch and wonder over the stars, sidera in Latin.

So to hear, as I did the other day, a public academic expert in matters scientific maintain that religious faith will never be able to reconcile itself with scientific truths and therefore religion is fakery, demands an alert and quick attention to the assumptions that remain unspoken behind such a mundane assertion. Human nature seems to be such that we give a reflexive benefit of the doubt to someone speaking from a position of authority, whatever it might be, but in our better moments we know that such deference is often misplaced. One may speak profoundly on one subject and foolishly on another. And we should note that the critical inspection of a claim quite self-confidently made has nothing to do with defending the opposing position. One might very well agree with this assertion that science will always have the final word, but we owe it to ourselves and to others and to truth itself to understand as comprehensively as we can the ground on which a conclusion rests. That will give a chance for truth to arise from unexpected quarters, perhaps surprising both parties to the argument.

What are the assumptions behind a claim someone is urging us to believe? That is the most important of questions when we wish to think something through, when we wish to be reasonable and treat serious questions seriously. To maintain, as did the authoritative voice I heard recently, that religious faith and science will forever stand facing off each other may very well be true if we assume that we come to know matters of faith in the same frame of mind with which we run our lines of logic. And that, in turn, may indeed be true, but let us be aware that the first assertion stands on this and many other assumptions, all of which more often than not stand quietly unrecognized behind brash but brittle propositions.

And making the quiet speak may change the universe of ideas we are discoursing about. Is all faith religious faith, or does that adjective make the claim tendentious by tacitly confusing the religious with the philosophical? Why is there, conversely, no adjective restricting the noun science? The empirical procedures of natural science are not commensurate with philosophical analysis, another kind of science, whose inquiries all remain in the mind beyond the confines of coacting entities in space and time. And if the absence of a qualifying adjective is meant to suggest the unchallengeable supremacy of the logically observed world, on what basis is that frame of mind self-certifying? Why, in other words, is what presents itself to our senses necessarily more certain than what presents itself to our minds? All such questions (and many more) work to articulate the assumptions on which someone is making a claim in any field of knowledge—scientific, religious, political.

And imagine how things can go wrong in a political debate! A brawl of words, a logomachy, where the fight is more often over expression, not truth; where one’s language is out to have an effect, not to bring a bright light to the cause and purpose of public policy and the just action which would accompany it. The forces of human nature always extend in two directions, toward both the emotional and the rational, and the classical position contends that our good life depends on maintaining a balance between those ends, not simply beating down what moves us with denouncing reason. But reason we must have in order to shape and purpose our emotions, which otherwise run about and reach after any ideas which seem to answer a present, pressing, personal need. If our political views—and particularly the views of those who wish to lead us—are not tied to an articulate and coherent and communicable set of presumptions, too many of us will be tempted to default to the one who can most strongly assert passionately what may be overarchingly appealing in the moment.

Hence the supreme importance of language and our knowing how to ask questions with it, direct or indirect: What does what you’re saying assume? Has someone told you what to think, or have you thought about the ideas you are urging on me? How do you know what you are saying is true? In the end, it depends upon whether we want the truth and true things because we respect ourselves enough to expect nothing less. But without the skill to think closely in language, we risk accepting what appears to be true as good enough for us, and that is where the moral danger lurks: we lower ourselves, coming to believe that the lesser—poorer ideas, artificial language—will suffice.

But when we once decide we are worth more than the artificial, there is a test we can apply to what we hear and read: is the language clear and simple and direct, and can we discern a serious disposition behind the words when the subject warrants such? The old noun for this was gravitas, weightiness or bearing, which ironically may be what typifies not the naïve, as is so often charged, but the wise and simple-hearted. And it might just bring us back to another old phrase, the intellectual life, pursuing which, says a long tradition, we can find order and reason and direction in times both peaceful and troubled.

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Thomas Mann’s bizarre but mythic short story The Transposed Heads retells an Indian legend treating the intricately riddling questions of identity: who am I, who are you, who are we together? A young couple and a friend are on their way home (in more ways than one), and passing a temple in the countryside, one of them, “obeying an impulse of his heart,” wishes to stop and pay honor to the goddess whose shrine they have by chance (if chance there is) come upon. He makes his way alone to the temple while the others wait for him at the road:

It was a shrine no more important than the little mother-house by the secluded bathing-place on the river Goldfly; but its columns and ornamentation had been carved with infinite piety and care. The entrance seemed to crouch beneath the wild mountain itself, supported by columns flanked by snarling leopards.

Columns carved with infinite piety and care. Slow work, no doubt, for what else is there to rush off to when your heart is devoted to your love? Something more than intensity is being suggested by the adjective infinite, something to do with the source of that builder’s preoccupation in a place both near and far.

Mann’s story depicts the traditional world where artists, like those who built this Indian shrine, looked within to find the design and purpose of what they had to do. The British scholar Brian Keeble wrote a work entitled Every Man an Artist: Readings in the Traditional Philosophy of Art (2005), explaining this ancient devotion, and he also edited an anthology of essays on the same topic by the English sculptor and printmaker Eric Gill, entitled A Holy Tradition of Working: An Anthology of the Writings of Eric Gill (1983). The scholar Erich Heller wrote insightfully on both Thomas Mann (Thomas Mann: The Ironic German, 1958) and the artistic life (The Artist’s Journey into the Interior, 1965). We would be the poorer without any one of these writers to remind us that there are other ways to conceive of who we are in the world.

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