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A colour-coded example of a four square writing method layout. The method is primarily a visual framework for assisting students with formulating ideas in an organized manner prior to writing an essay. The concept generally works as follows: A large square is drawn and divided into four smaller squares of equal size.
For example, newspapers, scientific journals, and fictional essays have somewhat different conventions for the placement of paragraph breaks. A common English usage misconception is that a paragraph has three to five sentences; single-word paragraphs can be seen in some professional writing, and journalists often use single-sentence paragraphs. [7]
The Jane Schaffer method is a formula for essay writing that is taught in some U.S. middle schools and high schools.Developed by a San Diego teacher named Jane Schaffer, who started offering training and a 45-day curriculum in 1995, it is intended to help students who struggle with structuring essays by providing a framework.
All the sentences within a paragraph should revolve around the same topic. When the topic changes, a new paragraph should be started. Overly long paragraphs should be split up, as long as the cousin paragraphs keep the idea in focus. One-sentence paragraphs can be emphatic, and should be used sparingly.
Sections usually consist of paragraphs of running prose, each dealing with a particular point or idea. Single-sentence paragraphs can inhibit the flow of the text; by the same token, long paragraphs become hard to read. Between paragraphs—as between sections—there should be only a single blank line. First lines are not indented.
The last line of a paragraph continuing on to a new page (highlighted yellow) is a widow (sometimes called an orphan). In typesetting, widows and orphans are single lines of text from a paragraph that dangle at either the beginning or end of a block of text, or form a very short final line at the end of a paragraph. [1]
Another example: when the spaces between words line up approximately above one another in several loose lines, a distracting river of white space may appear. [4] Rivers appear in right-aligned, left-aligned and centered settings too, but are more likely to appear in justified text, because of the additional word spacing.
In writing and editorial practice, authors and editors use the pilcrow glyph to indicate the start of separate paragraphs, and to identify a new paragraph within a long block of text without paragraph indentions, as in the book An Essay on Typography (1931), by Eric Gill. [2]