How To Write a Paragraph That Doesn’t Suck
A wise man named Cliff Sargent (from Better Than Food book reviews) once said:
“if you don’t have the urge to shoot yourself when you review your work from four years ago, you’re doing something wrong”.
This hit a little too hard when I re-read a Hamlet essay I wrote when I was a freshman.
In short, what I thought was a work of academic genius was in fact, bad writing par excellence. The prose was confused and instead of making interesting arguments, the essay made an IRS tax form read like a gripping thriller. However, the main problem was that there was no continuity in the paragraphs because I didn’t bother to learn an important lesson in structuring arguments: the Uneven U principle.
The principle hits like grandma’s cooking because everything changes after your tastebuds hit that first bite, and I’ve been writing like a different person ever since. Eric Hayot introduced the principle in his book: The Elements of Academic Style but it’s by no means only useful for cut-and-dry scholars. So, in this post, I’ll summarize Hayot’s idea without putting you to sleep and show how you can use it for better writing.
1: Paragraph as a unit of idea
As an aspiring literary critic, I spend a ridiculous amount of time reading other people’s writing and contrary to what I believed, bad writing exists. Bad writing generally doesn’t know what it’s trying to say. From a reader’s point of view, it’ll read like the private journal of a mad gardener, and from a craft point-of-view, the ideas lack flow when they move from paragraph to paragraph.
This brings me to the first insight: paragraphs are not arbitrary breaks in the text, but individual units of ideas. Tedious writing usually has confused paragraphs. Sometimes one will say absolutely nothing while another overflows with jumbled ideas. This setup is a perfect recipe for confusing reading since the reader must figure out the flow and what the writer is trying to convey.
So, for the sake of our reader’s sanity, I think a writer has to create a pleasant flow by confining one idea into one paragraph. It doesn’t mean that now all of the paragraphs will be short, it just means that the paragraph will be long (or short) enough to flesh out one idea. For example, the advice-focused posts on my Substack have shorter paragraphs because they’re more action-based. You can take the idea and run with it. But the extended essays tend to have longer paragraphs because every idea demands longer explanations.
In short, a paragraph break is a tool to keep your ideas contained to prevent confusion. However, breaks alone aren’t enough to sustain a pleasant flow in writing.
2: Flowing from one Idea to the Next: The Uneven U
The next step is to ensure that the ideas flow into one another given that they are contained. This is where the Uneven U comes in. The idea is pretty simple. In short, instead of following a set structure for a paragraph (like the good old TEEL we used to learn in high school), move your argument along different degrees of generality. Let me explain.
Notice that when we write, we’re constantly making statements. Some are more general (e.g.: all zebras have black stripes) and some are more specific (Ulysses was published on the 2nd of February, 1922, on Joyce’s 40th Birthday). Some writing suffers from being lost in generalities so everything reads like airy platitudes with no ground. And some writing is too lost in the specificities, resulting in choppy writing that should’ve been a list rather than an article. So, if we want to structure a paragraph that creates a pleasant flow, we need to create a seamless movement from the general to the specific, and then from the specific back to the general.
Let’s use some numbers for the sake of simplicity. If we assign a number to every level of generality (1 being very specific and 5 being very general), then a paragraph should follow the general progression of:
4 -> 3-> 2-> 1-> 2-> 3 -> 4 -> 5.
If we plot the progression the paragraph will look like an Uneven U (hence the name). It starts with a general idea (4) and as we get into the weeds of explaining it, the idea will naturally become more specific (3-1). Then towards the end of the paragraph, the idea will climb towards a greater degree of generality (5) because the explanation within the paragraph allows us to reach a deeper conclusion compared to our starting place (4). The trick to sustain a flow in writing is to turn the 5 into the new 4 of the next paragraph. So, a complete set of paragraphs will look something like this:
P1: 4 -> 3-> 2-> 1-> 2-> 3 -> 4 -> 5
P2: (5->4) -> 3-> 2-> 1-> 2-> 3 -> 4 -> 5
P3: (5->4) -> 3-> 2-> 1-> 2-> 3 -> 4 -> 5
If the number schema isn’t helping, think of each of the 5 as a cliffhanger that becomes the topic of the next paragraph. In other words, a paragraph should never end dead in its tracks. It should always leave something open for the next paragraph to explain. This will eliminate the choppiness we get from listicles or one of those ‘best places to eat’ articles.
3: It’s not a prescription
Even though the guidelines may sound technical, this Uneven U structure is more like a way of thinking about writing rather than a prescription. For me, it’s a handful rule of thumb when I’m in the editing stage, but there are times when I have to ditch the rule. So, bend the structure to your needs, and happy writing.
