That poor teach was being paid so little money.
You can read up on Ghost Little's two exquisite guides on writing shot sentences. With that debate dead and laid in a tasteful burial, let's examine the next structural piece: paragraph length.
William Faulkner was not an idiot. He didn't win a Nobel Prize for Jagging Around. He won it for Literature.
Faulkner often wrote in gigantic, thick, endlessly spiraling sentences and paragraphs. His southern gothic saga Abasalom, Absalom! houses a sentence over 1000 words long. You would need a tremendous paragraph to contain such mad, stream of consciousness writing. Therein lies the guiding star.
A paragraph's length, like a sentence's length, needs to be exactly as long as it has to be to do it's work. It's an ever-exapnding and ever-telescoping tool to do whatever job needs to be done.
Do you need a massive paragraph to convey a weighty thought to the reader? Use a wall of text. There's no rule that says you can't.
Pursuant to the point, short paragraphs accomplish a task, too. You can write a one or two sentence paragraph with well-structured sentences, sealing off the thought at both ends. After finishing the paragraph, the reader has a clear understanding. They understand that idea is done for now, on to the next.
Some editors will tell you short sentences are a cheap trick. That they're manipulative. That high-level writing is about making a a square-peg idea fit into a round-hole construct.
To use a technique like a short paragraph is effective, yes, but inappropriate outside of a newspaper format.
This isn't true. You have access to any technique at any time to execute a thought-transferrance to a reader. Techniques can still be misused or not executed perfectly, and that's on you, the writer, to assure the tool fits the job.
Good luck!
-- Alex Crumb
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