Understanding the Paragraph and Paragraphing

Understanding the Paragraph and Paragraphing brings together insights, theories, and data from a wide range of academic disciplines spanning 150 years into a single volume whose goals are to provide a better understanding of the paragraph and paragraphing and to consider the relevance and possible implications of this work for students, teachers, and applied linguists. The English paragraph has defied a thorough academic treatment and analysis for a considerable period of time, and the 19th century view of paragraphing still dominates among educators and writers who ever give any thought to the paragraph. Since the 1960s, however, researchers from different linguistic disciplines have engaged in various investigations into this subject area. For example, discourse grammarians, computational linguists, and contrastive rhetoricians, to name but three groups, have contributed to our understanding of this enigmatic phenomenon. Unfortunately, knowledge of most of this research has not moved outside the discipline-specific circles within which it was conceived and published, and the implications of this research for the teaching and learning of paragraphs have not, generally speaking, been considered. The book aims to rectify this state of affairs by offering an authoritative yet accessible and engaging view of the paragraph and paragraphing with recommendations for practice.