Paragraph & Dialogue Writing

Segregating information into paragraphs assists in absorbing and recalling information by the reader. It is crucial to not subject your writing to long winding and never ending paragraphs as it puts a strain on the reader to recall any information from the written material. To put this into perspective, imagine every exam and test you have taken in the recent past; the study material for the exam was contained in a book, with paragraphs, carefully structured to break down concepts into a small bits of information to assist understanding. Had the material been just page after page full of words, without breaks in between, it would have been downright impossible to make sense of any of it, let alone reproduce that information on paper.

Our brain is designed to appreciate structure, symmetry, which is what a good paragraph provides. Visually, paragraphs help the brain focus on individual details related to a subject which in turn is stored as a separate memory in our brain. While trying to recall information from a book, we often see the paragraph it belonged in as a picture in our minds. Once our brain isolates that memory segment, we can zoom in on the information we seek, from our mental picture. Hence, breaking down information into paragraphs is important.

Dialogues are always accompanied by speech marks or quotation marks “ ”. In text, they indicate when something is being spoken, a communication between two or more people; for example, if a person is writing about the discussion two people had on a park bench, it would be easier, and far more effective, to write it as a dialogue between two people, rather than in a reported speech manner.

Students will be taught how to organize information that will go in their writing, be it fiction or non-fiction, with the intent to break it down into paragraphs. Ideally, every new idea/concept should be written in a separate paragraph. As stated previously, it assists in information recall. Giving a proper structure to the writing, makes it much easier to edit it as well, or else, finding that one sentence that you need to work, in between all those lines would be like finding a needle in a hay stack. Paragraphs are also pleasing to the eye. Any teacher in the world will agree to this, it is better reading material that has been broken down into paragraphs rather than reading text bereft of them.

Dialogues are not only fun to write, they also ‘humanize’ the text. Reading a story about two people who live in the same house without a single dialogue in it would be odd, not to forget, a bit too clinical considering the story’s intimate setting. Dialogues also help the reader get an insight into the personality of the characters. Not everything needs to be written down in plain words, sometimes, things can be understood simply by the way someone says something. It has also become popular practice these days to quote one’s favourite character in a social setting. Dialogues are more fun to quote than descriptive lines, easier to remember too. They also help break the monotony of descriptive or narrative text.