Hammering on about Paragraphs

[Richmond Mathewson]

. . . Traditional Scottish Rants . . .

Well . . . I did warn you with 'barriers'.

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I am not trying to rant about the inadequacies of educational establishments as a way of Thanking Jacque for her help:

Her point about paragraphs was well taken. Also, as far as
I am aware Jacque is not on either the Linguistics or English
faculty at SIUC.

What I did point out was that in Southern Illinois (even if nowhere else)
there was a rather narrow definition of what constitutes good English.

My experience of Professors, Readers, Senior Lecturers and Lecturers
elsewhere is that they tend to have a broad, expansive, inclusive
view of things. Certainly when I worked at the University of
St Andrews the members of the Foreign Languages Department (with who I
had considerable contact as my wife did her PhD with them) did not
upset by different types of spelling and syntax (let alone grammar)
within English.

Of course one could point out that St Andrews is a top-class University,
while SIUC is not quite "up there". Having said that, Richard Rorty (NOT
in the Linguistics or the English Dept) is there !!!!!!!

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HOWEVER; if one is to introduce a PARAGRAPHS term into
Runtime Revolution, surely, one first has to decide what constitutes a paragraph. There seem to be 2 types of ways of marking paragraphs
prevalent in English: whether they are English, 'British',
North American, or Ruritanian is, really, beside the point.

Are we to detect paragraph breaks merely on the basis of TabKeyDowns
or something else. Certainly TABS will only detect the indented type
of paragraph.

Of course, one could be pedantic and insist on paragraphs being only 
of one type. However, that would be useless if one wanted to write
a general text analysis tool that could cope with whatever text was 
fed into it.

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Some people might realise, if they stopped and thought for
a moment that anybody who sections his/her use-list postings
with odd lines like this ----------------------
might be making gentle fun of him/her/itself. And references to
terms that mean different things in different dialects of English
(vacuum cleaners - geddit ?) might act as a further signal to anybody
but the most blinkered among the native speakers.

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I, for one, am gently unwinding at the end of an extremely
heavy and stressful year. I hope that everybody who reads this
is doing likewise. I hope that everyone has a peaceful, relaxing
and reflective end to the year, regardless of their religious
affiliation or lack thereof.

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson.

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A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
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