Paragraphs

[Lost in Mong Kok]

I've noticed that a lot of text documents have, if any, quite large paragraphs. They seem to be excessive in comparison to what I would use in English, although I tend to be a little bit overly happy with starting new paragraphs every 3 or 4 sentences.

Are paragraphs used in Chinese writing, and if so when? At present I use the same rule as in English - if the nature / content of the conversation changes, make a new paragraph. It keeps the reading tidy.

[chevil]

Paragraphs are indeed used in Chinese writing. However, my suggestion is to not worry about it. In Chinese writing paragraphs tend to look long, but then again in Western philosophy paragraphs are creepily long. IMHO it depends on personal style more than anything.

I write my paragraphs short in both English and Chinese.

If you're accustomed to writing short paragraphs because it's more tidy, then do so. You may find that if you read enough Chinese, your Chinese paragraphs may just naturally start to accumulate a bit of fat around the edges.

Tata

[xiangruyimo]

I don‘t know how the heck you would teach this, or even describe it systematically, but it has to do with the differing discourse structures of Chinese and English. A teacher of mine with a background in linguistics talked about this phenomenon, if only briefly, by bringing in a comparison of Chinese and English sentences. Chinese sentences are often much longer than English sentences, right? The reason for this is that Chinese discourse boundaries just aren't the same as English, and hence what is thought of both grammatically and "gut-level-y" (to a native speaker with fairly good written proficiency, of course) as a discourse clump is longer. I wish I could give you more specifics, maybe somebody with a deeper background in discourse analysis can pick this one up.

In any case, if you pay attention to sentence structure/size and compare what you see to English sentences, you might be able to get a better feel for what's going on. From there, paragraph-level understanding might just be an extension. (On the other hand, this teacher said that these sorts of investigations began fairly recently in the linguistics community, so it's possible that nobody knows how to quantify any of this stuff.)

[WestTexas]

If you want to see some really long paragraphs go read The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. These paragraphs are so big it feels like someone is clubbing you in the eye with them.