[joshmarlow]

I'll second Sindisil's comment about nested functions.

I still often do the paragraph approach, but the thing about that is you rely on the comments to stay up to date to describe that paragraph.

I prefer to instead move that paragraph into a small nested function and name it to reflect what would be in that comment. I feel function names are easier to keep up to date than comments (ie, programmers don't just read past the function names like they do comments).