: Re: Must every piece of speech get its own paragraph? I've had a few people read pieces of narrative writing I've done, and they seem to take issue with the fact that I sometimes put a piece

@Heady158

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As others have said, the convention is that each new speaker gets a new paragraph. Breaks in the statements of one person do not require a new paragraph. We generally do not break the speech of a single individual across multiple paragraphs unless the speech is relatively long.

Some of the comments on this question have indicated that you should disregard conventions and do whatever you like. If taken literally, I must disagree with this. While I would be the last to advocate slavish adherance to conventions, conventions exist for a reason: They allow us to convey information to the reader more economically. To take a silly example, suppose you said that you don't like putting quote marks around quotes, so you're going to use plus signs instead. Now the reader has to figure out that in your writing, plus signs indicate a quote. You make the reader do extra work, to shift mental gears, and for what? If, in your particular book or article, this serves some definite purpose -- hard to imagine in this example, but maybe you could some up with something -- then maybe it's justified. But don't break the rules just because you feel like it. I only break the rules when, (a) I want something to stand out, or (b) when the rule is so illogical in general or inapplicable in the present case that the advantages of breaking the rule outweigh the extra burden on the reader.

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