I have noticed that whenever I start a new section, subsection, etc., I need to preface my text block with \paragraph{} to get correct indentation for the first paragraph. In subsequent paragraphs, however, I note that I can simply leave an empty line and the paragraph is formatted correctly.
Is this correct behaviour, and if so what is the reason for this? Is the first paragraph supposed to be naturally unindented, perhaps for the reason of compatibility with lettrines and such? Is there an easier (terser) way to stipulate first-paragraph indentation?
I'm using the article documentclass under xelatex.
Thanks for any insight you can offer.
\paragraph{}
for formatting purposes. Ever! – Will Robertson Sep 8 '10 at 10:04