I’m deep in translation work right now, but not the paying kind. I’m translating another article for the Georg Sverdrup Society, whose journal I edit. (Sverdrup, in case you don’t want to bother with the Wikipedia link, was a founding father of Augsburg Seminary and College in Minneapolis, and of The Lutheran Free Church, which no longer exists. Its principles are carried on by The Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, to which I belong.) Sverdrup isn’t the easiest writer to translate, though I’ve translated far worse (see below). But this article is harder than usual, Sverdrup wrote it early in his career, before he immigrated to the US, and he hadn’t figured out yet that paragraphs shouldn’t run a whole page in length.
Hans Nielsen Hauge was far worse, though. I’ve written about him before, both here and in The American Spectator. He was the peasant preacher who sparked a revival in Norway around the turn of the 19th Century. Hauge was a man full of Christian zeal, but with little education. I’ve translated some of his books – all this is unpublished to date – and a couple of them feature long, long sections with no paragraph breaks at all. The man was not cerebral; he was an enthusiast. He sat down with pen and paper and just wrote whatever his spirit put into his mind. Thank the Lord for Post-It Notes (which got their inspiration, by the way, in church); without them it would be almost impossible to keep your place as you work your way through books like that. (Oddly enough, Art Fry, who got the Post-It idea in church, worked for Augsburg College, which I mentioned in the previous paragraph. This fact seems like it should be significant, but is not, so it doesn’t rate a paragraph of its own.)
It all comes down to something C. S. Lewis wrote… somewhere. Might have been a letter to a kid. He said that when you write badly, you’re asking the reader to do your work for you. It’s your job to a) think out what you want to say, and b) say it as clearly and comprehensibly as possible, without putting roadblocks in the reader’s way.
In case you’re unclear on how this is done, you basically change paragraphs whenever you move on to a new idea. It’s like a subheading in an outline. If your paragraphs vary in length, that’s perfectly fine. Some paragraphs can even be one sentence. In extreme situations, one word will do.
In the old days, when reading material was rare and relatively expensive, people with the reading bug would read pretty much anything they could get their hands on. If you rode into a town in the early American west, any reading material you brought with you would be eagerly borrowed – old newspapers were especially prized, and it didn’t matter how out of date they were.
But those days are past. Today you need to fight for your readership. Keeping your paragraphs short – and congruent with your narrative purpose – is a way of working with your reader.
Like all rules, there are exceptions. But exceptions to this rule are pretty darn rare.
