paragraphing

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The division of a piece of writing into separate paragraphs, marking shifts in topic or focus.

   The editor praised the tidy paragraphing throughout the report.

   Poor paragraphing can make even a strong argument hard to follow.

   Similarstructure, layout, organization, division

   Note

   In an editor's comment it is a mass noun: good paragraphing, poor paragraphing. It also counts, though, and then it names one particular way a text could be divided. Robert L. Brown and Martin Steinmann's Rhetoric 78 (1979) has subjects choosing between acceptable and unacceptable paragraphings of a recipe. That plural suits any setting where several possible divisions of the same text are set side by side and compared.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of paragraph.

   The writer is paragraphing the manuscript according to the new style guide.

   They kept paragraphing the transcript until every speaker had a clean break.

   Note

   A form that carries both verbs behind it. One is the everyday verb of breaking text into paragraphs. The other is the newspaper verb of reporting something in a short item. Both are transitive, so the form usually takes an object, as in paragraphing the manuscript. As a gerund it names the activity. Once it takes an article or a plural, as in two paragraphings, it has become the noun for the result.

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