Are paragraph spaces used for emphasis?
I am writing a story and I have these 3 sentences that elaborate on the ending of a first page. This way the reader will continue to read my story.
My question is, am I allowed to place paragraph spacing in between these sentences to create spacing?
Are there any other stories that do so? Is it correct or will it be a waste of space?
By spaces, I mean the following.
Sentence 1....
(Space here)
Sentence 2...
(Space here)
Sentence 3....
(Space here)
1 answer
"Am I allowed ..." No. If you do this, the Writing Police will come to your house, break down the door, and arrest you.
Seriously, what do you mean by "am I allowed"? Who is going to stop you and how?
The real question is, "Is this a good idea?"
There appear to be two issues here: 1. Should you put space between paragraphs? And 2. Should you make a sentence its own paragraph for emphasis.
The answer to #1 is a matter of formatting style. You have to do SOMETHING to show where new paragraphs begin. Sometimes people put space between paragraphs to separate them. Sometimes people indent the first line of each paragraph. Occasionally people put the paragraph symbol, ¶. The first two methods are used routinely and are understand by pretty much anybody who can read English, and are pretty much interchangeable. The only time it matters is if there is some other sort of formatting you are using that makes one or the other difficult to read. Like if you want to use some blank space to show breaks between sections, then also using it to separate paragraphs could make it unclear whether any given break is a section break or a paragraph break.
As to #2, emphasis, like any technique for emphasis, you should use this sparingly. If you are speaking quietly and suddenly you shout, it gets the listeners attention and lets them know that what you said so loudly is important or exciting (at least to you). But if you shout constantly, it's just annoying.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/40913. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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