The pilcrow earns its keep

The pilcrow — ¶ — started its life as a scribe's shorthand for a new paragraph, at a time when paragraphs weren't set off by blank lines or indents at all. Text ran on, dense and unbroken, and the reader needed some signal, however small, that a new thought was beginning. A red mark in the margin did the job.

We solved that problem a different way. Modern typesetting gives every paragraph a line break, sometimes an indent, sometimes a blank line's worth of air, and the pilcrow retreated to a niche: word processors use it to show where you've pressed Return, editors use it to mark a paragraph for insertion, and everyone else forgets it exists.

That's a shame, because the pilcrow does something a blank line can't: it points. A blank line is silence — it tells you a paragraph ended, but says nothing about what's coming. A pilcrow in the margin, set slightly apart from the column of text, can carry a word or two of its own: a date, a short label, a cross-reference. It's a signpost, not just a gap.

That's the whole argument for putting one back to work. Not as nostalgia, not as decoration, but because a mark that can say something is more useful than one that can only mean "stop."

Where it still works

Margin notes in scholarly editions never stopped using something like it. Legal documents number their paragraphs for the same reason lawyers cite them — so a mark that names a section is doing real work, not just marking a boundary. Anywhere a reader needs to jump back into the middle of a long piece, a pilcrow with something to say beats a blank line every time.

The rule I hold myself to: a mark in the margin has to justify itself. If it's not naming the section, dating it, or pointing somewhere, it's decoration wearing punctuation's clothes — and decoration is the first thing a reader learns to stop seeing.