The Paragraph Element

The <p> element wraps a paragraph of text — a block of one or more sentences that belong together. It is the workhorse tag for ordinary body text: articles, descriptions, comments, anything that reads like prose rather than a heading or a list.

<h1>About This Site</h1>
<p>This site collects recipes tested in a home kitchen, not a professional one.</p>
<p>Every recipe here has been made at least three times before being posted.</p>

Browsers apply a default margin above and below every <p>, which is why paragraphs visually appear as separate blocks with breathing room between them, without you writing any CSS at all.

A common beginner habit is stacking several <br> tags to fake the gap between paragraphs instead of just starting a new <p>. It works visually, but it throws away the actual meaning — a screen reader or search engine has no way to tell that you meant to start a new paragraph, since as far as the HTML is concerned it's still all one block of text.

What is the correct way to start a new paragraph of body text in HTML?

Browsers automatically add spacing above and below <p> elements by default.

The ____ element is used to wrap a block of ordinary body text, like a paragraph in an article.