David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random
Walks). His editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials
of an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was
launched at the National Archives in Ottawa in September,
2012. His latest book is Notes
from a Derelict Culture. A CD of his
original songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.
I've
been noticing lately that the English paragraph seems to
be sinking gradually into the world of the minimal like
Michael Crichton’s shrunken people in Micro, a practice
that hovers between the silly and the technical. This is
especially the case with many of the political articles
of our day. The once-mighty paragraph that adorned our best
writing in history and politics, as well as literature,
is getting shorter by the day, often settling into the one-sentence
fragment.
Not only a block of print on a page, the paragraph is a
unit of thought, a means of conveying a description, a theory,
a report, an impression, a complex idea, or a rhetorical
flow with a degree of authority. It is holistic by nature
and, as such, an aid to contemplation. It is not merely
a stylistic tic or a passing literary convention that can
be denatured for convenience. A paragraph properly leads
to another when the mental trajectory it favors and permits
is complete. It is, in its way, like a cerebral lobe that
serves a particular function. One-sentence paragraphs are
like lesions. Of course, a standard paragraph these days
may run to two or three sentences, but the difference is
not significant. The sense of continuity is stunted.
Some
of our Top G bloggers and columnists — I won’t
name names — now seem to believe the general run of
readers to be incapable of sustaining interest without taking
coffee breaks after the initial expression of a thought,
and so have adjusted to this reductive paradigm. Others
may even have adopted this truncated mode of writing not
only expediently but quite naturally and unreflectively.
For those who have studied the classics or cut their teeth
on the great prose writers of the Western tradition —
say, Sir Thomas Browne, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Edward
Gibbon, Arnold Toynbee, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Joseph Epstein,
et al., and in fiction, James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, Willa
Cather, Walker Percy, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann (the
latter two in translation), and many more of our illuminati,
masters of the paragraph who continue to covet and explore
the long arc of language — the tendency toward discursive
abridgment is a sign of intellectual surrender to the shriveled
sensibility of the modern era.
In “Politics and the English Language,” George
Orwell presciently warned of the decline of political and
literary writing. His argument is even more relevant today
than it was in 1946 when the essay appeared. Orwell wryly
notes that “the struggle against the abuse of language”
is regarded as “a sentimental archaism.” But
the fact is that “our thoughts are foolish,”
“unevocative,” “prefabricated,”
and that our language has become slovenly, mere “verbal
refuse.” Literary and expository practice is differentially
the latest proof of Orwell’s grim assessment, in large
part owing, no doubt, to the ubiquitous sweep of the Internet
and electronic media that characterize a digital age drowning
in emails and other ephemera and that have us squinting
and scanning rather than taking time to absorb and ponder.
After
having bought a typewriter, Friedrich Nietzsche observed
in an 1882 letter that “Our writing equipment takes
part in the forming of our thoughts.” This aphorism
is equally true of the current writing-and-cognitive environment
in which we inevitably participate. “The world of
the screen…is a very different place from the world
of the page,” argues Nicholas Carr in The Shallows,
“attention splinters, thinking becomes superficial,
and memory suffers.” As a result, “Authors will
face growing pressures to tailor their words to search engines”
and will find themselves “fated to eschew virtuosity
in favor of bland but immediately accessible style.”
I’ve
just finished reading three political articles by writers
I greatly admire, one a well-respected American blogger,
another a celebrated American author who has become a household
name, and the third a young Canadian columnist of considerable
acumen. The former two have grown adept at producing contracted,
often one-sentence paragraphs, not always grammatically
controlled, with irritating regularity. The latter has become
a one-sentence junkie. Printing out his material requires
four pages instead of one and a half, unless I glue his
sentences together. The purpose seems to be to make a point,
but the concatenation of points feels spasmodic rather than
fluid.
In an age in which people are hooked on Twitter (280 characters,
which may increase), “tweeting” rather than
writing, there seems little embarrassment in acting like
a cartoon canary rather than a serious person. Pace Elon
Musk, Twitter should have died immediately under the withering
hand of its preposterous and demeaning designation. Additionally,
when people have come to rely on text messages and sound
bites, read vooks (emails with embedded videos in virtual
pages), and depend mainly on film, videos, and a carnival
of images to dispense and acquire information, the long
paragraph developing a complex thought quickly dulls the
eye as it does the patience needed to follow and assimilate
the slow and intricate effusion of genuine thinking. The
one-sentence paragraph is a kind of mental spurt that evaporates
on the page and makes it harder to knit together what should
be a coherent whole. After all, we enjoy a long succession
of green lights while driving; a red light at every intersection
is a palpable annoyance. The opposite is now the case when
negotiating a tract, treatise, article, documentary, essay,
or book. The single-sentence paragraph becomes like a red
light, creating stop-and-start traffic to the end of the
page.
Obviously,
there is a place for the one-sentence paragraph when it
announces a bulleted list, indicates dialogue, introduces
a new idea or a change of pace, or begins a piece of writing
with a blazon and ends with a clincher. Were I a sports
writer, for example, as I once thought of becoming after
a stint on the sports section of my campus newspaper, I
might have begun my report on the recent Super Bowl with
a leading sentence like: “The Philadelphia Eagles
won the game, but the Kansas City Chiefs scored more points.”
My conclusion might have been: “Never lose heart,
even if you win.” Both one-sentence items would have
bracketed an analysis of different coaching styles and game
strategies, the concept of “magic” (an epithet
often applied to Patrick Mahomes), the changing quarterback
style in the NFL, the sense of brotherhood among competitors,
and the necessity of playing — or living — through
pain: football as a life lesson. The one-sentence paragraphs
would have functioned as parentheses, enclosing a more substantial
analysis or report in paragraphs of respectable length.
As noted above, the one-sentence paragraph is merely an
emblem of the proclivity to hyphenated thinking, of the
general bias toward reductiveness. It symbolizes a trend
that appears to be growing, which does not augur well for
the future of Internet writing or even for the more traditional
model of expository, descriptive, or narrative prose. It
is a symptom of introspective decay, of thinking in fractions
rather than in wholes. Thankfully, at least the majority
of political analysts and culture critics have resisted
the temptation for now, but I fear the writing is on the
wall for our scribbling Belshazzars, signifying collapse.
Mene mene tekel upharsin: “numbered, numbered, weighed,
divided.”
