It’s a question we all ask ourselves eventually: how do you abbreviate the word paragraph?

Par? But pronounced pair, of course? This doesn’t sound compelling to me.

“I need to finish another par of this copy before lunch.”

I think what it suffers from is the same plight that an abbreviation of character suffers from. I see char all the time in code because it’s a very popular data-type. The pronunciation of char is unsettled: care? car? actual char as in charred broccoli? So it is with par. It doesn’t help that pair and par are both English words, not uncommon.

I’ve seen para around. I think I’ve seen it scribbled in red by writing class TAs on the margins of mediocre student essays.

(Annette was standing in the office doorway. In her hand, her stapled essay was flipped to the second page, and her thumb rested near a messy missive: 2nd para arg??

“Sorry to bother you,” she began, “I was looking over your feedback and I couldn’t quite read what this word was—is it para?”

“Yeah, para,” the TA replied, not looking up. “Paragraph. I was saying your second paragraph was kinda weak, didn’t really get the argument there.”)

In writing para may be understandable, but in speech I’m not sure if para flows well. There’s something about it that makes me think, this abbreviation was not meant to be read aloud. Like IYKYK or POC.

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to say with this para.”

“Could you insert a para about the glorious history of the Motherland?”

I think it’s the schwa, the unstressed syllable -a that para ends on. It’s as if we abbreviated helicopter to heli (pronounced not helly, but something like hellih or hella). And when the Brits need to abbreviate the television, they refer to the telly, not the telleh or tella.

Lately, Stephen King introduced me to an alternative: graf.

In expository prose, paragraphs can (and should) be neat and utilitarian. The ideal expository graf contains a topic sentence followed by others which explain or amplify the first.

My first impression is, hey, I like that! Graf sounds like you’ve been in the trade for something-odd years. It doesn’t have the schwa-ending affliction that plagues para, and sounds sort of fun to say. Spoken aloud, it does bear the risk of confusion with its etymological ancestor graph, which means something else (or rather, many things else). The -af ending is uncommon in written English, but I suppose graff would be too cumbrous to write out, wouldn’t it.

I looked graf up and it looks like this is actually a journalism shorthand! Google’s search results sport titles like “Hed, dek, lede, graf, tk: live with it” and “The hed, the dek, the lede, and the nut graf.” I knew lede from before, but the rest are new to me. The vaguely dirty-sounding nut graf is apparently just a nutshell paragraph, the graf that summarises the article in a nutshell.

So maybe para is the cant of the overworked academic, and graf is the jargon of the overworked journalist? I like the idea of these being two cultures developing their own slang, sequestered from each other. I don’t like shibboleths, except in fiction, so what if para/graf became one?

(A hypothetical ethnic conflict between Higher Education and the Press. Under cover of night Julia Tan of the Russet Star slinks up to the Lambent University gates but is accosted by two sentries.

“Halt!” the left sentry cries. “Who goes there?”

“Jessamyn Trimble,” Julia fibs, unbreaking. “Department of English.”

The left sentry frowns, as the one on the right whips out a mediocre student essay and points at a paragraph. “Then what’s this?”

“A graf,” says Julia. “Wait, no, it’s a para, a para—”

“Impostor!” both sentries cry in unison. In seconds, campus security descends upon the gate, the glint of moonlight on their service pistols.)

Anyhow I wonder if I can annoy everybody at once. Parag. Ragra. Aph.