You know the one. You’re three-quarters of the way through a piece about some tangled, interesting thing, and the writer stops cold to bring you up to speed with a sentence like: Trump has aggressively pursued tariffs as a key strategy during his administration. It is shaped exactly like information. It sounds, if anything, rather intelligent. And it is written for a person who does not know what is going on — which is conspicuously not the person who is a thousand words deep into an article about trade.
That’s the idiot paragraph. Not the cartoon version — nobody quite writes Donald Trump is the President of the United States. It’s the subtler, worse one: the intelligent-sounding catch-up line that brings an imaginary stranger up to speed and gives the actual reader nothing, dropped in by reflex because the form seems to demand a context sentence whether or not context is needed. The stranger who needed it was never going to follow the argument anyway, and the adult who was following it just got stopped at a red light for no one.
Journalism has written to a third-grade reading level for so long that the idiot paragraph has stopped looking like a choice. It looks like grammar. You want to write, so you do what writers do — you copy the moves you’ve seen — and you go hunting for a place to put one, not because the piece needs it but because a paragraph with no stranger to catch up feels, somehow, unfinished. What you don’t notice is that the moves you’ve seen are just the habits of the particular handful of things you happened to read. There is a great deal more writing in the world than that. The idiot paragraph is a style, it belongs to a particular kind of publication, and I am not writing that kind of publication.
This is also, as it happens, exactly how an AI writes. It learned the moves from the same slice we all read, and it will reproduce every one of them — the catch-up sentence, the hedge, the dutiful summary of the paragraph it just wrote — faithfully, tirelessly, and without once asking whether the move was needed. That is most of the problem with it, and a decent argument for keeping a human in the loop who can still tell the difference. This piece was written with one of those machines. A person decided which of its instincts to keep.
The best thing anyone ever made about this was in The Naked Gun 2½. Establishing shot: the White House. Caption: THE WHITE HOUSE. A beat. Then, underneath, a second caption: WASHINGTON, D.C. That is the idiot paragraph, filmed, by people who understood exactly what it was and exactly how funny it is to say the obvious twice to someone who didn’t ask.
So here is the deal I’m offering, since we’re going to be spending some time together.
I will cite my sources. When I quote a line from a movie, I will tell you it’s from the movie, and then — this is the part that apparently needs saying — I will trust you to know what a movie is. You know that a film “based on a true story” is not a sworn affidavit. You know an epigram is doing different work than a statistic. You know a joke when it steps on your foot. Not every sentence in a piece means the same thing or is loaded the same way; there are facts, and there are jokes, and there are quotes, and a grown reader holds them apart without a diagram. The citation is the honesty. After that, the judgment is yours — which is the whole point of telling you where a thing came from in the first place.
What I won’t do is write the paragraph that apologizes in advance for the previous paragraph. I won’t pre-chew the irony. I won’t post a second caption under the first.
In Galaxy Quest, the aliens take an old television show for a set of “historical documents,” because they have no concept of fiction — no idea that a human being might say a thing that is shaped like a fact but isn’t one, and mean something truer by it. They are the most literal readers in the universe, and they are aliens, and that is not an accident.
I’m not writing for them. I’m writing for adult, educated, thinking people. That’s the audience. That’s the respect. Read it like one.