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What is the Ideal Paragraph Length?

What’s the ideal paragraph length? Is there an ideal paragraph length? Are there hard-and-fast rules that govern how long our paragraphs — “grafs,” if you’re cool and/or “in the biz” — or can you just create paragraphs of different lengths willy-nilly, like some damn hippie?

The latest episode of Grammar Girl’s podcast opened with this horrifying story:

At one university, a professor will measure what he or she thinks is an ideal paragraph length. This is a photo of a section of a tape measure.

A while ago, I saw a comment on Facebook about professors who are teaching college students to make all their paragraphs the same length. The woman wrote, “There are professors at my school who deduct points, sometimes even letter grades, if paragraphs aren’t the same exact length throughout a paper. Because writing should be ‘balanced’ and it can only achieve ‘balance’ if all paragraphs are equal in length.”

Since this is one of the most preposterous things I’ve ever heard, I thought I must have misunderstood, but I asked for clarification and learned that the “uniform paragraph length rule” is so pervasive at this university that one professor uses a ruler to measure physical paragraph length in an introductory English class.

Let me say it right now, upfront.

There is no one ideal paragraph length.

According to Grammar Girl, both the Yahoo! Style Guide and the college handbook A Writer’s Reference (affiliate links) say the ideal paragraph length is between 100 and 200 words. However, “good writers treat this as a suggestion and not a hard and fast rule.”

The problem is, we live in an age of skimmers, not readers. If you’re a content marketer, blogger, or essayist, you don’t have the luxury of getting people to dig into a block of text between 100 and 200 words. Large blocks of text without any white space make our eyes glaze over — at least mine do — and we just zone out and get the early morning stares. A big block of text just looks boring as shit. People ignore long paragraphs because they’re dense, so we should avoid cramming in that many words, of which this is the 100th.

Seriously, that graf is exactly 100 words long.

That one was eight.

And that one was four.

Do you see the difference? Do you feel how much easier it felt to read the short one-sentence paragraphs instead of that 100-word monstrosity?

Like it or not, people don’t read, they skim. They prefer short paragraphs, not long chunks of text. Sure, you can slip them in once in a while, but people tend not to read them. Did you even notice I said “shit” in that 100-word paragraph up there?

Unfortunately, writing teachers tend to give young writers bad advice, which is why there are “rules” about paragraph length.

Just remember, there’s the right way to write, and the school way. And the two are frequently different.

Paragraphs Aren’t a Part of Your System, Man!

Paragraphs can — and should — be varying lengths. If you want to write 200-word paragraphs, go ahead. If you think you can manage several 200-word paragraphs in a row, be my guest. But I’ll bet if you were to do a heat map or readability study of your work, you’d find that very few people are slogging their way through that bog.

There are already several “rules of English” that we can safely ignore. Either they’re obsolete, the language has changed, or they never should have been a rule in the first place.

I’ll admit, I’m not a big fan of some of the changes that are happening to the English language. Like the fact that “literally” now means figuratively. (Seriously, go to Google and enter “define literally!” That irritates me to no end!)

A screenshot of Google's search for the phrase Define literally. It says used for emphasis to express strong feelings while not being literally true.Conversely, some things were incorrect in the first place, and they’re only now being fixed, like the whole “don’t end your sentence with a preposition” thing.

Teaching students that a paragraph must be of a certain length is also terrible teaching. Good writing will have paragraphs of varying length, from a couple hundred words (Yeesh!) to just one word. To teach otherwise is a disservice to your students because many of them will go through life thinking it’s a requirement when at best, it’s a guideline.

And before you tell me, “You have to learn the rules before you break them,” I would say 1) there’s not a real rule about paragraph length, and 2) you can teach people that paragraph lengths vary without blowing their minds.

They can make the leap from not knowing how long a graf is to knowing that it can be different. You don’t have to spend an entire semester teaching them this one rule, only to tell them, “Just kidding!” at some undetermined point in the future.

Bottom line: there’s no ideal paragraph length, and you can make them any size you want.

Seriously.

Photo credit: Qimono (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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What’s the Difference Between Satire and Parody?

Although the two words are used interchangeably, there’s a difference between satire and parody.

For one thing, parody is considered an element of satire. Both use exaggeration humor, and irony. But HG.org considers parody to fit within satire.

Or as, British writer Luke Edley said, “parody is a brick, and satire is the wall.”

So what’s the difference?

In essence, parody makes fun of an original work. The Copyright Alliance says it’s a comedic commentary about a work, that requires an imitation of the work. On the other hand, satire makes fun of an aspect of the world but doesn’t rely on a previous work to do it.

So parody uses (usually) copyrighted work for its commentary, while satire doesn’t.

A Mind Map of Satire & Parody by Austin Kleon
A Mind Map of Satire & Parody by Austin Kleon
It’s the difference between Harvard Lampoon’s Bored Of The Rings or Barry Trotter and The Unauthorized Parody and my own book, Mackinac Island Nation

Bored Of The Rings is a rip-roaring retelling of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings and Barry Trotter rips off the more popular Harry Potter series. Meanwhile, Mackinac Island Nation is an original work that does not draw on any previously copyrighted work at all. (And it sold a lot less than either of the books. Shut up.)

Mackinac Island Nation makes fun of, and draw attention to, the attitude of a certain segment of American society, while Bored Of The Rings and Barry Trotter just make fun of popular fantasy/urban fantasy novels.

(Also, both parodies rely on the cardinal sin of using joke names, which, to my mind, is the lowest form of humor. Lower than puns even! I can deal with puns, but Frito Bugger and Spam Gangree, or Barry Trotter and Lon Measley of Hogwash School of Witchcrap? BLEAH! Joke names are never funny and the authors should be ashamed.)

Parody can also make fun of public figures, such as politicians and celebrities, in order to make its (satirical) point. Saturday Night Live is an example of parody and satire coming together, and it will sometimes parody characters, TV shows, and popular movies.

On the other hand, South Park is usually satire without being parody. They don’t borrow from original source material, but they do make fun of public figures and current events.

Are parody and satire considered protected speech?

Satire and parody are used primarily, says the Freedom Forum Institute, “to attack and ridicule individuals’ moral and character flaws, such as vice, unfairness, stupidity or vanity.”

According to the website HG.org, satire is certainly protected by the First Amendment:

This makes both satire and parody powerful tools when making fun of, and pointing out the foibles of, politicians, celebrities, athletes, and other public figures, as well as certain political attitudes and beliefs.

From Wikimedia Commons: This would be the evolution of violence: starting from a raving primate, we develop into a nose-detecting homo habilis, then a greek hoplite looking at the next man, a roman legionary, who sits weeping because of the mockeries of a satiric poet.
From Wikimedia Commons: This would be the evolution of violence: starting from a raving primate, we develop into a nose-detecting homo habilis, then a greek hoplite looking at the next man, a roman legionary, who sits weeping because of the mockeries of a satiric poet.

Just remember that the First Amendment only applies to the government and government agencies limiting your freedom of expression. Private entities, like a social media site, retail store, or even an individual, can make rules about what you can and can’t say when you’re on their website, in their store, or in their home.

Even if you wrote a great parody about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg (and called him — God help me — Fart Zucker-booger), Facebook would be allowed to delete your otherwise brilliant parody from their website. Even though Mark Zuckerberg is a public figure, and you’re allowed to parody him in a story, Facebook is a private entity and they can remove your content.

But if you hosted it on your own website, then there’s nothing Facebook could do about it.

What’s the difference between pastiche and parody?

A pastiche is like a parody, only there’s no intent to ridicule or attack. The whole point is to recreate and replicate the original work, and to recreate the original experience.

For example, there are hundreds of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Bill Peschel (who said the above line) over at Peschel Press has published a couple hundred of them, while Otto Penzler of Mysterious Press published The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories.

There is even a database of over 9,000 entries of different Sherlock Holmes pastiches, as maintained by Philip K. Jones (link downloads an Excel [.xls] file).

The whole point of reading most of these pastiches is to make you think there are some additional Sherlock Holmes stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. You’re meant to experience those same feelings that you had when you read the original 60 stories in the Sherlockian canon.

A parody is not meant to create that feeling, it’s meant to (usually) get a laugh by using the original source material.

In other words, a parody could be considered a pastiche, but not all pastiches are parodies, simply because they’re trying to replicate the original work and recreate the original experience.

Photo credit: Austin Kleon (Flickr, Creative Commons)
Photo credit: Utente:M1ka1L (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 3.0)

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Jargon Words Are the Hallmarks of a Pretentious Ass

As David Ogilvy once said, jargon words “are the hallmarks of a pretentious ass.”

And that’s how I feel when you use handshake as a verb when you mean to say “introduce.” Or a value add.

Too many business types, especially in the tech and social media world, can’t stop sounding like the Dack.com Bullshit Generator. They say things like “disintermediate bleeding-edge paradigms” and “synergize mission-critical infomediaries” without actually knowing what they mean.

(Seriously, go check out the Bullshit Generator and build your own sentence. Pick one term from each of the three columns, and you can generate phrases like “we matrix cross-media web-readiness.”

Here are 10 jargon words that we need to get rid of immediately

  1. A value add: From “value added,” which comes from “valuable.” Don’t make up a noun phrase when there’s a much better word available (see “on a going forward basis”). Like useful, helpful, vital, beneficial, prized, advantageous, and meaningful.
    2. Gill's Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon
    Gill’s Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon
  2. Drinking the Kool-Aid: For one thing, this is horribly offensive, since it refers to the Jonestown Massacre of 918 people in 1978. For another, the people who died in that mass murder-suicide drank Flavor Aid. But mostly you should stop using it since it mocks the deaths of more than 900 people.
  3. Onboarding: Sign up. Register. I hate this word so much that even though my spellchecker is flagging this word right now, I refuse to add it to my user dictionary. So it’s just sitting there, with a little red squiggle under it. This offends my sense of competitive perfection, but “onboarding” offends it even more.
  4. Frictionless: Easy. You know what’s easier to say than “frictionless?” “Easy.” It’s literally one syllable less. And if you ever say you have “a frictionless onboarding experience.” you deserve to be mocked openly by children. Just say “signing up is easy.”
  5. Learnings: They’re just “lessons.” There was nothing wrong with saying “lessons.”
  6. Learners: Students. You mean students — students learn lessons, learners do not learn learnings. If you feel funny calling adults in a conference breakout session students, then call them “participants” or “attendees.” I have never heard of a single example where “learners” was the best option.
  7. Handshake: I heard someone say they were in the business of “handshaking” companies together. At first, I thought she meant meeting new people. When she said it a second time — “we can handshake you to other companies” — I was worried she was having a stroke.

    8. A tweet I wrote about the jargon word "to socialize."

  8. On a going forward basis: From now on. Seriously, “going forward” was bad enough, but someone said, “You know what? That’s not complicated enough. Let’s add more words to it.”
  9. On the go forward. The bastard child of “on a going forward basis.” Seriously, I would rather you said “going forward” than to hear you utter this again.
  10. Socialize: Just say share. You socialize at a party, you don’t “socialize this data.” And if anyone ever says “socialize these learnings,” I’m going to scream.

Very rarely do bullshit words make effective jargon. There are some words that we use that started out as jargon words — Jeep, radar, scuba — but those are words that actually made communication easier. People got tired of saying “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus” over and over.

And I understand that we need things like acronyms and acrostics to shorten some industrial terminology, like how emergency responders have to go through “NIMS” training, which refers to National Incident Management Systems. No one wants to say that every time.

But until and unless you can convince me that “on the go forward” is better than “from now on,” keep your bullshit jargon words where they belong: in an iron box that gets rocketed directly into the sun.

Photo credit: Joe Mabel (Wikimedia Commons, GNU Free Documentation License)

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Words that Rhyme with Orange, Purple, Silver, and Month

It’s a common misconception that there are certain simple English words that don’t have a rhyme. Orange is the most commonly cited one, although purple is a close second.

In fact, the list I hear the most is orange, purple, silver, and month. That list was even a clue in a recent Ellery Queen pastiche, which I heard on their podcast.

However, being the obsessed word nerd that I am, I like to know uncommon and esoteric words. Which means I know the words that rhyme with orange and a few others.

I even like to throw this out as a little fun fact, especially at conferences.

I spoke at the National Association of Government Communicators Communication School today and yesterday (June 19 & 20), and I promised to reveal those rhymes to the attendees. Which I forgot to do.

So if you’re interested, here are the actual rhymes to those four words:

Sporange is a word that rhymes with orange.

  • Orange: The sporange is a very rare alternative form of sporangium, which is the botanical term for a part of a fern or similar plant. It’s the case or sac where the spores — the equivalent of seeds in a flowering plant — are stored. It’s more frequently called the sporangium, but it exists, so count it! I had a debate over this one in the latest editions of Branding Yourself with @HaggardHawks, the British obscure word finder.
  • Purple: Two words: to hirple is the Scottish word for hobble or walk with a limp, and curple, which is the curved part of the hindquarters of a horse or donkey. Nurple is a slang word, as in “purple nurple” and it does not count.
  • Silver: A chilver is a female lamb.
  • Month: This one is a toughie. The word is the mathematical term, oneth, as in N+1th, such as “hundred-and-oneth” or even in fractions, as in 16/31, or “sixteen-thirty-oneth.”

There are other words that have esoteric rhymes, and I’ll start sharing those as I find some interesting ones. Or get invited back to speak at the NAGC!

A chilver is a female lamb
A chilver is a female lamb. It’s the word that rhymes with silver.

Photo credit: Le Monde végétal, Ernest Flammarion, 1907 (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain in France and the US)
jLasWilson (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Do You Even Need a Style Guide? Not Necessarily

What’s the proper way to make an apple pie? Are they shredded, diced, or sliced apples? Do you make your own crust or buy pre-made crusts? Do you have a fancy lattice top or the Dutch apple crumble top?

And whose recipe do you follow? Is it the first one you Googled, or is it Memaw’s secret family recipe handed down from generation to generation?

Ask this question on Facebook, and you’ll have plenty of strong opinions from plenty of people, and about 12 back-and-forth arguments before someone is calling someone else a Nazi.

Style Guides Are Like Apple Pies

This is how people, especially writers, feel about their style guides.

Different style guide examples. It's hard to choose the right one.To them, their style guide is the One True Guide, their Bible about how issues and misunderstandings about language, punctuation, and even grammar are to be handled.

There are a few dozen style guides, including ones from the Associated Press, Chicago Manual of Style, American Psychological Association, Modern Language Association, Turabian, Council of Science Editors, and even The Elements of Style.

And you’ll find outspoken proponents of every one of them.

Each person will insist that their style guide is the right one and will argue with those heathens who don’t agree to worship The One True Guide.

Except there’s no One True Guide.

No one is able to lay claim that their guide is the definitive way to punctuate sentences, abbreviate states, or denote time (a.m./p.m. versus AM/PM).

(But you can have my Oxford comma when you pry it from my cold, stiff, and dead fingers, Associated Press!)

Each guide is assembled by learned editors who have heated discussions about each new entry and change in their guide.

They’ve discussed and debated new issues as they come up, they look at how language is being used and written in society, and they update the guides to reflect those changes when necessary.

In May 2012, the Associated Press said they would no longer object to using the word ‘hopefully’ at the beginning of a sentence, rather than making people say ‘I am hopeful’ or ‘It is hoped that.’

People went nuts. They howled in protest, they screamed and tore their garments, and the Internet burned for three days. People said they were going to die on this hill and they weren’t going to let any stupid Associated Press tell them how to use English when Mrs. Kugelschreiber had drummed this rule into them so many years ago. They were going to stick with the “right” way to do it, despite what these so-called experts said.

Ahh, innocent times.

Of course, the angry mob missed two important points:

  1. It was a made-up rule to begin, having been created in the 1960s. Before then, it was acceptable to start sentences with “hopefully.” Besides, there’s no rule about starting sentences with other floating sentence adverbs like “sadly,” “unfortunately,” and “surprisingly,” so this one was just something people latched onto without understanding why.
  2. The rule only applied to writers and editors who worked for the Associated Press. It had nothing to do with general language usage. People were free to start or not start sentences with “hopefully” to their heart’s content.

This is the important thing to remember about style guides: While these are prescriptive guides, they are by no means the official rules for The Way English Is Done. These guides are only for a particular job, field, or organization.

The Associated Press Stylebook tells writers about the rules they must follow when writing for the Associated Press, although many non-AP journalists use it. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage is only meant for writers and editors at the New York Times. The APA Publication Manual from the American Psychological Association is written for academics in social sciences, like psychology, speech communication, linguistics, and sociology.

And if you’re not part of those organizations, you are not bound by those rules.

Which Style Guide Should I Use?

Bloggers and content marketers can argue about which style guide is the best, but there’s no right answer. I always recommend bloggers use the AP Stylebook, because it’s small, inexpensive, and addresses 95% of our issues.

I also like the AP Stylebook because many bloggers act as citizen journalists, which means we should follow the guide that most other journalists use.

However, there’s no real guide for bloggers to use. We’re free to pick and choose, but we do so voluntarily, not because there’s an official Way English Is Done.

Bottom line: As long as you spell words right and put them in the right order, the rest is up to you. The benefit of a style guide is that it helps you be consistent throughout your writing. It means you always know where to put punctuation, whether you’re going to follow the postal abbreviations for U.S. states, and how to capitalize headlines.

And whether you should use the Oxford Comma or if you’re a filthy, godless monster.

This means you can pick one you like the best and are most familiar with, or you can even create your own style guide. Just make sure you follow it consistently and apply it to all of your business writing — blog articles, web copy, brochures, emails, letters, and even internal communications.

Photo credit: FixedAndFrailing (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)

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Plagiarism is the Writer’s Cardinal Sin

This whole Melania Trump plagiarism flap shouldn’t be a big deal. I think if it weren’t for the fact that it’s the Republican National Convention, we wouldn’t have even heard about it.

It’s never a big deal any other time a public figure has been caught plagiarizing. Sure, it makes the news, but most people could not care any less. But to creative professionals, especially writers, this is yyy-uge.

News analysts reported that Trump’s speech was 7% similar to Michelle Obama’s 2008 DNC speech. That may not seem like much, but by college academic standards, that 7% can get you an F in your class, and even get you thrown out of school.

A PhD friend of mine commented on my Facebook status yesterday that she normally checks her students’ papers with Grammarly’s plagiarism checker. She ran a quick check on the two speeches, and found that roughly 7 – 8% of Melania’s speech triggered the plagiarism alert, which would have resulted in an F for the paper. Other friends in academia said they have failed students, including those in Masters programs, for 7%.

Some people are dismissing Melania’s plagiarism as “just common words.” That anyone could have used these words, and that we’re making a big deal out of nothing about these “common supportive phrases.” They think it’s a complete coincidence that the same common words and phrases discussing the same ideas were assembled in that same order.

Let’s take politics out of it for a moment. Forget that this is the wife of the Republican presidential candidate.

As a professional writer and adjunct professor, I can tell you that, common words or not, this is still plagiarism. When you take a series of words and string them together in a particular order, no one else may string them together in that order, unless they cite you as a source.

Even failure to cite your sources is enough to fail your paper.

Ernest Hemingway: Common Words Used Uncommonly

Ernest HemingwayOne of my favorite Hemingway short stories, Big Two-Hearted River, is filled with common words. It’s 8,015 words long, and written at a 4th grade reading level. There are no unusual words, and there’s only one character, Nick, who’s going camping and fishing. Two pretty common activities with common jargon. Here’s my favorite excerpt from the story:

Nick was hungry.

He did not believe he had ever been hungrier He opened and emptied a can at pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying pan

“I’ve got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I’m willing to carry it, Nick said.

His voice sounded strange in the darkening woods. He did not speak again.

He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the ax from a stump. Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the four legs down into the ground with his boot. Nick put the frying pan and a can of spaghetti on the grill over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface- There was a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato catchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off. He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread slowly on the plate. Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato catchup. He knew the beans and spaghetti were still too hot. He looked at the fire, then at the tent, he was not going to spoil it all by burning his tongue.

No big words, very few 3-syllable words. In fact, he used just 124 different words. But Hemingway could take those 124 words and make cooking a camp dinner one of the most interesting stories you’ll read all day.

Hemingway’s use of common words is not the issue; we’re all able to use them. I could even write a story that only uses these 124 words. The problem is, I can’t put them in that order.

I can’t use the phrase “‘I’ve got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I’m willing to carry it,’ Nick said.” without either giving him full credit or suffering the wrath of academics and literary types. I can’t even change a couple of words and present it as mine.

That’s plagiarism.

To most of us who actually care about this — the academics, the literati, the word nerds — it doesn’t matter who plagiarized. The fact is, it was done, and it’s being dismissed as unimportant by people who don’t realize the importance of intellectual property.

Probably because they’ve never had their creations stolen for someone else’s benefit.

This is What Theft Looks Like

No Burglars signThis is an important issue to me, because I’ve been plagiarized on three separate occasions, all by newspaper professionals. Two editors, one publisher. Two Canadians, one American. Three people who financially benefited from something I do for very little money.

Three people who worked in a profession where there are only a few important rules:

  1. Don’t steal shit.
  2. Don’t make shit up.

That’s it. Those are two of the most important rules in journalism, and violating them is a career ender.

Of the three thieves — and they are thieves — the American editor and the Canadian publisher lost their jobs. The publisher lost his membership in the Alberta Press Council, and may have even stepped down as the president of the Strathmore and District Chamber of Commerce. The American newspaper editor will never have a job in newspapers again.

You can Google both their names, and their sins still follow them, five years later.

In the world of creativity, especially its written form, plagiarism is the cardinal sin. Of all the Thou Shalt Nots in the world, it is the Thou-Shalt-Nottiest.

Bottom line, it doesn’t matter who did it. I think it was an error of process, not malicious theft. If I had to guess, it was a speechwriter who watched a lot of different convention speeches by candidates’ wives, took notes, and used the phrasing without remembering where it came from.

(UPDATE: It turns out, Melania read some phrases from people she liked, including Michelle Obama. The speechwriter, Meredith McIver took notes, and used them in the speech. Then, she said she never checked Michelle Obama’s speeches to see if the phrasing had been used before. So, not malicious, just careless.)

Because despite what she said, Melania didn’t write this herself. Everyone who gets on that stage gets vetted, ghosted, and edited. There are so many people with so many fingers in every pie, nothing is written by a single individual with no oversight.

But worse, much worse, is the attitude that this isn’t a big deal. That the media is making too big of a fuss. Or that the Obamas did it eight years ago, so that makes this one less bad, or even acceptable.

Politics aside, this is never acceptable. Whether you’re an apologist or a grubby-fingered troll digging up dirt on the other side, plagiarism and theft of ideas is never acceptable.

If you have never created something and had it stolen, you can’t understand why this is a hot button issue for so many of us. As a writer whose books are regularly pirated, as a journalist whose columns are pilfered, I believe this is the one line that writers of integrity should not cross.

Do not justify the sin, regardless of who committed it. There are no excuses, you can’t buy indulgences, and it should never, ever be waved off as a staggering coincidence of “common words.”