Nonstopparagraphing
Or nonstoparagrafing: A typing technique once popular in fanzines, now seldom seen; instead of indenting five spaces or tabbing for each paragraph, the first paragraph begins flush left, the following paragraph begins one line down and two spaces past the last character in the last line of the preceding paragraph.
This is easy to do on a typewriter, difficult with word processing software.
(Annoyingly, while Fancy 1 does use nonstopparagraphing, the article on nonstoparagrafing doesn't! so the image that illustrates it well is the previous entry, on nicknames, which does.)
| From Fancyclopedia 2, ca. 1959 |
| (Ackerman) Paragraphing in which no line is skipped between paragraphs, and the new paragraph is indented the length of the last line of the preceding paragraph. That sounds complicated but isn't.
When the typist reaches the end of a paragraph he drops down a line, maybe hits the space bar a time or two, and then goes on writing, as is done here. If the paragraph happens to end flush with the right-hand margin, as ours did, Speer recommends use of a # mark (typewriterese for ¶) to create a new fractional line; Ackerman skips a line and indents five spaces as with the beginning of conventional paragraphing. The system flourished mightily in Third Fandom and is still popular. |
| From Fancyclopedia 1, ca. 1944 |
| nonstoparagrafing - (Ackerman) - Paragrafing in which no line is skipped between paragrafs, and the new paragraf is indented the length of the last line of the preceding one; in other words, when the typist reaches the end of the paragraf, he drops down a line, maybe hits the space bar once or twice, and goes on writing, as is done in this publication. This is visual Practice varies on what to do in a case like that, where a paragraf ends flush with the right-hand margin. Ackerman skips a line and indents five spaces; Speer doesn't like that because the skip-a-line paragrafing should mean a greater break than usual in the discussion, and he tries to avoid ending a paragraf at the rh margin; if it does happen, he uses a # mark (typewriterese for paragraph mark) to make a new fractional line. |
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Comment from Ned Brooks - 9/1/08 10:13 AM
I did nonstopparagraphing for years when cutting mimeo stencils on a typewriter - it's quite natural there. I could do it fairly easily in the long-obsolete computer typesetter I still use - perhaps I will.... FancyFont allows the position along a line to be remembered for reuse, so that with the addition of "\m1" at the end of a paragraph, and then "\hm1" at the beginning of the new paragraph, the exact same effect would be achieved.
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