The last two indie published books I read (by two different authors mind you) were the same. Not in plotting or characters but in the fact that they existed on single sentence and single sentence fragment paragraphs. As in, almost the entire book was written this way with the authors hitting "enter" instead of the space bar after each sentence.
Most people don't know anything about grammar except "rules were made to be broken." If you fall in that group, it isn't something to brag about any more than you should brag you are among those who know how to swim just enough to get yourself (or someone else) drowned. Personally, if you haven't taken at least one writing course at a college ranked in the top 100 in the U.S. or top 500 internationally by U.S. News and World Report, you need cough up the money to to hire an editor. I know, I am being harsh, but an unedited book doesn't just harm its author, it harms all indie authors. It keeps them from being accepted into contests for the traditionally published and encourages editors at traditional publishing companies to toss submissions from unsolicited authors without reading them.
However, I am fair, I will explain what a sentence is (in case you were flirting with the kid next to you instead of listening in your high school class), what a paragraph is, and when sentence fragments may be appropriate.
A sentence must have a subject and a verb. She ran. When I homeschool my children, I don't accept sentences under eight words. As you can tell reading this post, I practice what I teach (for the most part). Short sentences have their place: The increase tension; they are great for young, new readers; they can stylistically be used to flush out a specific character's nuances through dialogue, and if someone knows how to use them correctly, they can contribute to an experimental or poetic work. If you didn't get a full on B.A. in English from one of the abovementioned colleges, don't even think you can craft something in that last category, please. I hate to say "no," but the fact of the matter is that one in a million people can do something like that without any training and 500,000 in a million will think they are that one.
An incomplete sentence or sentence fragment, can be short or long and can have both a subject and a verb, but it is dependent on more information to form a complete thought. Into the night, the butterfly flitting left and right, fully abandoning myself to the freedom. That was a fragment. I know you are probably thinking that is just a jumble of nonsense and could never be a sentence. Try adding "I followed" at the beginning: I followed, into the night, the butterfly flitting left and right, fully abandoning myself to the freedom.
Fragments can be tricky. Most indie authors I read get over excited about putting them in everyone's dialogue because they believe that is how people really talk. For one character, that could work. In response to a question in a tense moment, that could work. However, speaking in fragments denotes a character of lower intelligence (or one who wants you to think s/he is dumb). If you actually listened to people, you would soon discover that most use complete sentences in their dialogue most of the time.
Like sentences, when I am teaching my children, their paragraphs must always be at least five sentences, but I am much more flexible on this rule. First, variety in paragraph size is a good thing. It adds interest to what you are reading. Second, whenever a new character talks, it needs to be a new paragraph:
"Will you go home with me?"
"No!"
"Why not?
"The game isn't over!"
The above is a perfectly natural stream of one-sentence paragraphs. However, when that is the way you wrote your entire book without rhyme or reason, it is like going to a movie and finding out the only background music through the adventurous parts, through the romantic parts, and through the comedic parts, is the same pounding four bars of music over and over and over and over and over again. You also would not want to write an entire book of back and forth one-liner dialogue.
In high school, we were given paragraphs and told to find the main idea and then list the supporting details. Read your paragraph, and see if any of the supporting details ended up in the next paragraph (or next five paragraphs if you have resorted to mistaking the space bar for the "enter" key). Or pay a good editor (i.e., not an editor who is like, "Oh, you are such a creative genius for not using standard paragraph and sentence structure.")
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