When You Feel Like It

Today I had my seventh graders working in pairs coming up with lists of reasons why you would start a new paragraph.  I get tired of the answer "every five sentences" that I often get from them, because as I point out to the students in the book we're reading together, some paragraphs are one sentence long, and some are fifteen.  It just depends.

We hammered out a list including the basics, like "new idea," "new place," "new time," "new speaker," but then one student announced, "You should start a new paragraph when you feel like it."

I explained that you shouldn't just randomly start one; you need to have a reason.  I have a couple of kids this year who put a period suddenly in the middle of a sentence, just because they feel like it.  Some don't always feel like capitalizing proper nouns.  A few don't feel like writing at all. 

But the more I thought about his answer, the more I liked it.  It doesn't belong on our list, but it is our ultimate goal: that the kids would just know when a new paragraph is needed, not because they go through the list in their heads, but because they have read - and written - enough good prose that it's an instinctive choice.  That day is still a long way away for many of my students, but this conversation reminded me of why I am constantly working on putting models of good writing in front of my classes, and why we are always writing and revising.