Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today,

we're going to talk about what makes something a good paragraph, and then we're going to talk

about what some words and phrases for money actually tell us about history. This first segment was written by Edwin Battistella.

We should pay more attention to paragraphs. I know that sounds obvious, but what I'm fretting about

is the advice that beginning writers get to begin paragraphs with topic sentences and to end with

summary sentences. Such a topic sandwich filled

with subpoints, supporting sentences, and examples lends itself to formulaic writing. This strategy of

tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them can be useful for public speaking, where listeners don't have a text to follow. But in written exposition, readers don't need you to be quite such a tour guide. They can refer back to the previous text. They can read slowly when they need to, or skim or skip ahead when they get

bored. And if you bore them, they will skip ahead. Designing good paragraphs isn't about

taking people on a walk, but about treating them to an experience. So paragraphing is less about

being a tour guide than it is about being the conductor of a symphony.

A paragraph can end in a sharp point, a pinprick that wakes up readers and focuses their attention on what you've just written.

Readers should think, oh, not yupp.

I tried to do that just before with the sentence, and if you bore them, they will skip ahead. Sometimes good paragraphing is as simple as

letting the start of one paragraph serve as the conclusion to the last, leaving readers hanging

for half a beat.

Rafi Kachadurian does this in his essay, The Taste Makers, writing about the flavor industry.

Kachadurian tells readers about the confidentiality agreements that makers of food flavorings sign.

The paragraph ends with an example of a company honoring the agreement

even years later. Asked about their flavor development for Snapple, the Brooklyn-based

flavoring company Virginia Dare, quote, refused to discuss the matter, unquote. The next paragraph

opens with the broader point, quote,

...