> because people don’t speak in paragraphs. I mean, we kind of do. We use an especially low "final" intonation when we finish explaining an idea, and an especi

> because people don’t speak in paragraphs. I mean, we kind of do. We use an especially low "final" intonation when we finish explaining an idea, and an especially high "intro" intonation when we start. Kind of the same way we do with individual sentences, but more exaggerated. And we take longer pauses. When you transcribe someone talking for 10 minutes on a podcast, for example, you don't invent paragraphs out of thin air. They're generally pretty clear. > and rarely do ‘chapters’. Again, we do. People rarely talk for 20 hours straight; rather they give hour-long lectures delivered across 20 days. Each one is a chapter. Even an hour-long speech is generally clearly divided into sections. The speaker concludes the section, changes their intonation, "asks" the audience what that leads to, takes a long pause while the audience contemplates, then presents the "answer" which is the start of the new section. The reason you might not think we use this organization when speaking is because it's encoded is intonation and timing -- prosody. And we don't directly represent prosody in writing systems. But that doesn't mean it's not there when spoken. Indeed, a major part of being an effective speaker of the written word is in "restoring" this prosody that is missing on the page. And things like paragraphs and sections are major clues towards that end.