Stylistic classification of the english vocabulary

b) The Paragraph

A paragraph is a term used to name a group of sentences meaning a distinct portion of written discourse. In fact the paragraph as a category is half linguistic, half logical.

Paragraph building in the style of official docu­ments is mainly governed by the particular forms of docu­ments (charters, pacts, diplomatic documents, business let­ters, legal documents).

Paragraph in the belles-lettres and publicistic styles is strongly affected by the purport of the author. To secure the desired effect, a writer finds it necessary to give de­tails and illustrations, to introduce comparisons and cont­rasts, etc.

The length of a paragraph normally varies from eight to twelve sentences. The longer the paragraph is, the more difficult is to follow the purport of the writer. In newspaper style, however, most paragraphs consist of one or two or three sentences.

So the paragraph is a compositional device. The paragraph, from a mere compositional device, turns into a stylistic one. It discloses the writer's manner of depicting the features of the object or phenomenon described. It is in the paragraph that the main function of the belles- lettres style becomes most apparent.

The paragraph in some style, such as scientific, publicistic and some others has atopic sentence, i.e., a sentence which embodies the main idea of the paragraph or which may be interpreted as a key-sentence disclosing the chief thought of the writer. In prose the topic sentence is placed either at the beginning or at the end of the para­graph. In the belles-lettres style the topic sentence may be placed in any part of the paragraph.

It is sometimes impossible to decide which sen­tence should be regarded as the topic one. Each syntactical whole of several combined into one paragraph, may have its own topic sentence or be a topic sentence. In other words, there are no topic sentences in emotive prose as a rule.