With the Bennett-Amis and McGinn-Honderich dust-ups swirling in recent memory, it may be somewhat anti-climactic to sift through another sandstorm. Nevertheless, a recent critical assault, fuelled by reactionary petrol, has me pondering why sloppy sullies have replaced serious investigations into writers who express themselves differently.

Not long ago, that dour doberman Philip Hensher nipped his fangs into young pup Adam Thirlwell. Thirlwell's crime? Writing Miss Herbert, which Hensher described as "a rambling and highly egocentric work of criticism."

Thirlwell's greatest crime, according to Hensher, involved syntax. He reprimanded Thirlwell (although without offering any examples from the text) for being "addicted to the one-sentence paragraph beginning with a preposition." He made it sound like Thirlwell was shooting up in the restroom.

Let's tackle the preposition issue first. If Thirlwell is striving for an unusual expressive approach, why should preposition placement matter so much? Grammatical rules are not often so cut and dried. Hensher resembles the unknown government official who, in 1942, witnessed his stubborn devotion to grammar answered with ridicule. In a story often misattributed to Churchill, a memo was passed around. Someone had affixed a postscript complaining of a sentence ending in a preposition. Another writer responded that this complaint was "offensive impertinence, up with which I will not put."

Hensher is not the first to dismiss the one-sentence paragraph. In 1890, a stuffy grammarian named John Earle wrote in English Prose that "The term paragraph can hardly be applied to anything short of three sentences." This led to a response from a giddy rhetorician named Edwin Herbert Lewis. In Lewis's 1894 volume, The History of the English Paragraph, he noted that Earle's favorite author, Dr Johnson, "uses no less than 27 per cent of single paragraphs. Nay more, in the very book in which Earle makes the dictum we have quoted, there are various excellent paragraphs of less than two sentences each. Not every author writes better in style than on style: Professor Earle is one who enjoys that distinction."

So if Hensher is going to nail Thirlwell to the wall for skimpy paragraphs, Thirlwell is in good company. Beyond the self-evident examples of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce, Lewis offers us some interesting statistics. He observed that 62% of Daniel Defoe's Essay Upon Projects was composed of single-sentence paragraphs. For John Bunyan, 61%; for William Paley, 58%; and, for Lawrence Sterne, 55%.

In fact, no less a conservative than William Safire once bemoaned a word-processing program's inability to accept a one-sentence paragraph, asking, "So what if one-sentence paragraphs were infrequently used, or even a rarity, which I doubt - must every writer conform to the norm?"

Hensher's resistance to a long-practiced stylistic form resembles a spaceship enthusiast who can't understand why a stray acolyte won't put on a track suit. This may be an attitude compatible with people who always agree with each other, but it has no place in the consideration of a needlessly maligned facet of language.