It is a long time since I was at school and I know things change a lot over the years, but has English grammar really changed that much? New words, yes. New sentence structure, not so much.

So what is the problem?

There is one problem I seem to keep coming across in the books I beta read, edit, proofread, review or just read for pleasure, and that is a basic rule of writing that gets broken all the time.

When to start a new paragraph.

I’m beginning to realise it is not always taught in school these days, or even in college. One lady author I beta read for lately was somewhat embarrassed to tell me that she was a qualified English teacher for many years, had degrees in creative writing as well as English Literature, yet had never been taught the basic rule:

New Person, New Paragraph.

Another…