The muse finally visited you and you worked furiously to finish your draft—a work of pure, unadulterated genius. And as your focus comes back down to this earthly plane, you look back over your masterpiece: a massive, differentiated block of text.

Crap.

Paragraphs.

You forgot paragraphs.

So you take a deep breath and start going through the text, adding line breaks at roughly equal intervals. Isn't that all a paragraph is, anyway? If the reviewers have a problem with it, they'll tell you.

Well, you're not entirely wrong. A major aspect of paragraphing is aesthetic: it's a way to visually break up the text so that your reader doesn't get overwhelmed or lose interest before they even start. Yes, a dictionary will tell you something about a paragraph being a unit of discourse, but all writing is persuasion and all persuasion has aesthetics, so your post-facto fix is still justified.

But just because it's justified doesn't mean it's optimal. Let's go back to that dictionary for a moment. At its best, the paragraph is a self-contained unit. It's a collection of sentences that all relate closely to the same idea. But how many sentences?

You may have some vague memory of a high school class where every paragraph had a topic sentence, one sentence of evidence, two sentences of commentary and a concluding sentence. Five. Every paragraph should be five sentences. It's a rock-solid way to write, but, with apologies to the geologists, it's about as interesting as a rock, too.

So what's the best way to think about a paragraph? Well, the first thing to do is ditch the muse. Relying on inspiration might work once or twice, but you're going to make a career out of this, so you're better off with method than myth. If you never want to think about a proper paragraph again, then always start with an outline. If it's detailed enough, your paragraph structure will naturally emerge from its innermost level. But if you're too stubborn to change your ways, then think about pacing and strategy.

A set of roughly equal paragraphs serves the purpose of visually breaking up the text, but can set too regular a pace: it's very unlikely that each of the ideas you introduce has the same weight. You may want to move through some ideas more swiftly than others. But there is a strategy to paragraphing, too. Actually, let’s say that again in a different paragraph:

There is a strategy to paragraphing, too. Your high school teacher would call that last sentence a topic sentence: the sentences that follow all elaborate on it. And some version of that sentence would likely appear in an outline. But take a moment to think about that sentence from the reader's perspective.

Especially in an academic article, the first thing a reader does is read the abstract, check the figures, and scan the text. Paragraphs are integrated signposts that effectively bullet point the main ideas and convince the reader to engage more deeply with the text. Even if your strong suit isn't in the organization and preparation of the text, you can maximize the effectiveness of the text after the fact by looking at the strength and importance of each paragraph's opening line—just like your reader will.

Read all the first lines of your text: how much of the story can they tell on their own?