paragraph
Enable an AI agent to recognise a paragraph, assess its textual and structural state, and choose edits that preserve its intended meaning and role.
Research draft, second pass
A second pass drafted this model: the structure a model of this thing needs, and what is known about it in the world. The line under this one says how the second half was obtained - researched against sources, or recalled without web access, in which case nothing here was read anywhere and every claim is a lead to verify. Unreviewed either way.
Researched by: Codex + Grok
Purpose and description
Enable an AI agent to recognise a paragraph, assess its textual and structural state, and choose edits that preserve its intended meaning and role.
A paragraph is a bounded block of prose that develops one rhetorical unit (a claim, step, or scene) and is marked in a document by a break in the text stream rather than by a heading or list structure.
It can be Identify or propose paragraph boundaries and record the evidence and uncertainty.; Assess whether the paragraph performs its intended discourse role and identify specific gaps.; Rewrite or reorder internal content while checking meaning, references, and emphasis.; Split or merge paragraphs when their organisation and surrounding context support the change.; Move or extract a paragraph after resolving its contextual dependencies.; Convert paragraph representation while preserving boundaries, embedded content, and applicable formatting..
Distinguishing features
A line wrap changes the displayed line without necessarily creating a paragraph boundary; inspect structural markers or editorial evidence.
A paragraph can contain one sentence or several, so sentence-ending punctuation alone does not establish its extent.
A heading primarily labels following content; determine whether an isolated text block labels a section or participates in the discourse.
A list item is bounded by list membership and may contain multiple paragraphs; do not equate the item boundary with every paragraph boundary.
A visually separated block is only a paragraph candidate until its markup, source structure, or discourse context supports that interpretation.
Scope
+ The text span identified as one paragraph and the evidence for its boundaries
+ Relationships among sentences, clauses, and other content within the paragraph
+ The paragraph's contribution to surrounding discourse
+ Paragraph-level formatting and its relationship to textual structure
+ Paragraph-level editing constraints and unresolved quality issues
- Whole-document architecture, publication status, and document-wide policy
- Sentence-level grammar and token-level linguistic analysis as independent models
- Page geometry, pagination, and line breaking as layout systems
- The underlying truth of claims and the full records of cited sources
- Independent identities and behaviour of headings, lists, tables, and quotations
Characteristics
- Boundary basis
- Explicit document structure; textual separator; visual inference; editorial assertion; mixed; unknown Determines how confidently an agent can select, move, or replace the paragraph without absorbing neighbouring content.
- Boundary certainty
- Confirmed; provisional; disputed; unresolved Prevents uncertain segmentation from becoming an unexamined basis for editing.
- Text extent
- Character count and sentence count, with counting and segmentation conventions recorded Supports change comparison and length constraints without assuming a universal ideal paragraph length.
- Discourse role
- Introduction; explanation; argument; evidence; description; narration; transition; conclusion; other; mixed; unresolved Makes quality assessment depend on what the paragraph is intended to accomplish.
- Internal organisation
- Claim-support; sequence; comparison; cause-effect; elaboration; other; mixed; unresolved Helps identify missing connections and judge whether reordering or splitting would improve the paragraph.
- Context dependencies
- Links to antecedents, preceding premises, following elaborations, and referenced material Identifies meaning that could be lost when the paragraph is extracted or moved.
- Container membership
- Containing document, section, list item, quotation, table cell, or other text-bearing container Establishes structural constraints and distinguishes paragraph identity from the identity of its container.
- Review state
- Unreviewed; issues identified; revision proposed; accepted for stated purpose Separates an agent's proposed assessment from an editorially accepted result.
- Edit constraints
- Freely editable; meaning-preserving edits only; quotation constrained; approval required; unknown Limits transformations according to recorded authority and textual obligations.
Also called
Where this came from
wikidata · CC0 1.0
Also registered as vr.tr.paragraph
Drafted structure
Bundle to layer to finding to question, as the second pass will find it: 6 bundles · 11 layers · 11 findings · 27 questions.
Paragraph extent Establishes which text belongs to the paragraph and how that boundary is known.
Paragraph operations require a defensible span; visual separation, punctuation, and structural markers can disagree.
Boundary evidence
Records the markers and interpretations used to segment the text.
Supported boundaries
Record the proposed start and end, the evidence for each, and any competing segmentation.
- Which structural markers, separators, or editorial decisions establish this paragraph's start and end? boundary
- Did these boundaries come from the source document, an import process, or an agent's inference? provenance
- Where does visual grouping disagree with the recorded paragraph boundaries? boundary
Container and content
Separates the paragraph from its containing structure and embedded elements.
Structural membership
Record the containing text structure and which inline or adjacent elements belong to the paragraph.
- Does this paragraph sit inside a section, list item, quotation, table cell, or another container? definition
- Which citation markers, inline objects, and annotations belong to this paragraph, and which merely appear beside it? boundary
Internal discourse Captures how the paragraph's content works together.
Length and grammatical correctness alone cannot establish whether a paragraph forms a useful discourse unit.
Focus and function
Identifies the intended contribution and the content that serves it.
Intended contribution
Record what this paragraph is meant to achieve and whether its focus is explicit, inferred, or disputed.
- What should the reader understand, experience, or accept after reading this paragraph? definition
- Which sentences or clauses serve that contribution, and which introduce a potentially separate focus? boundary
Sentence connections
Examines the relationships that make internal progression intelligible.
Coherent progression
Record support, sequence, contrast, and referential connections, including missing or ambiguous links.
- How does each sentence or clause connect to the content before it? definition
- Which pronouns, omitted premises, or transitions leave the internal connection unclear? boundary
- Would reordering or adding a connection clarify progression without changing the intended claim or sequence? action
Surrounding discourse Records how the paragraph depends on and contributes to nearby text.
A paragraph can read well in isolation yet fail in context, or rely on context that extraction would remove.
Incoming context
Identifies information supplied outside the paragraph that its interpretation requires.
External dependencies
Record external antecedents, definitions, premises, and framing needed to interpret the paragraph.
- Which expressions or claims require an antecedent, definition, or premise outside this paragraph? boundary
- What context would need to accompany the paragraph if it were quoted, moved, or retrieved alone? action
Outgoing contribution
Identifies what the paragraph supplies to the text that follows.
Sequence role
Record the paragraph's relationship to its neighbours and consequences of changing its position.
- Does this paragraph continue, contrast with, exemplify, or conclude the preceding discussion? definition
- Which later passages rely on terms, claims, events, or expectations introduced here? boundary
- What surrounding text would require revision if this paragraph were removed or moved? action
Paragraph representation Connects the paragraph's logical structure to its stored and displayed forms.
Importing, rendering, and copying text can create or erase apparent paragraph boundaries and meaningful formatting.
Logical and visual form
Distinguishes paragraph structure from display effects.
Representation alignment
Record how markup or editor structure corresponds to indentation, spacing, line breaks, and page breaks.
- How is this paragraph represented in the source format, and how is its separation displayed? definition
- Which apparent breaks are wrapping or pagination effects rather than paragraph boundaries? boundary
Conversion integrity
Tracks whether changes of representation preserve paragraph content and structure.
Preserved paragraph form
Record losses or ambiguities introduced by OCR, copying, export, or format conversion.
- Which extraction or conversion steps produced the current text and paragraph segmentation? provenance
- Did conversion lose or introduce boundaries, emphasis, inline references, or characters? measurement
- Which discrepancies require checking against the source before editing? action
Paragraph revision Supports evidence-based assessment and controlled paragraph transformations.
An agent needs criteria for selecting edits and checking their consequences, rather than applying generic rules about paragraph length or topic sentences.
Fitness for purpose
Assesses the paragraph against its intended reader, role, and editorial requirements.
Actionable quality issues
Record specific comprehension or composition problems and the criteria supporting each judgement.
- Against the intended audience and discourse role, where is the paragraph unclear, repetitive, incomplete, or overloaded? measurement
- Which explicit editorial requirements apply to its length, terminology, tone, or organisation? provenance
- Which identified issue warrants revision, and what observable improvement should the revision produce? action
Transformation constraints
Determines which edits are permitted and what must survive them.
Meaning-preserving change
Record edit authority, protected wording, intended semantic invariants, and checks needed after rewriting, splitting, or merging.
- May the agent rewrite this paragraph, or do quotation fidelity, attribution, or approval requirements constrain the edit? action
- Which claims, qualifications, referents, sequence relationships, and emphasis must the proposed edit preserve? boundary
- After rewriting, splitting, or merging, do the resulting paragraphs retain those commitments and connect correctly to their neighbours? measurement
Evidence and external alignment What the world already says about this thing, gathered so the model can be checked against it.
A model that cannot be lined up against existing standards, identifiers and practice cannot be adopted by anyone who already uses them.
Reported evidence
Findings from the breadth pass, kept separate from the structural claims.
Kinds and varieties
Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.
- narrative paragraph
- descriptive paragraph
- expository paragraph
- persuasive/argumentative paragraph
- dialogue paragraph
- lead/topic paragraph
- concluding paragraph
- hanging/indented display paragraph
- Which of these kinds and varieties hold for the sense of paragraph this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
What the second pass must settle
- Does the registry intend paragraph to cover both a discourse unit and an editor-defined paragraph block, including empty blocks, or should those interpretations be distinguished within this model?
- Which boundary conventions must be supported across languages, writing systems, OCR outputs, and plain-text sources?
- How should paragraph identity and lineage be tracked when revisions split one paragraph into several or merge several into one?
- Which neighbouring registered models own heading-like paragraphs, dialogue turns, verse stanzas, and paragraph-shaped code or display equations?
- Which genre-specific criteria can support assessments of focus and coherence without imposing expository-writing conventions on every paragraph?