LaTeX

Hello,

I am currently writing something in LaTeX. The last time I did that, I used \\ frequently to create paragraphs with spacing in between, like this:

This is my first paragraph. It contains some text about things.\newline
This is a new line, without spacing in between the first and the second line, as they should read like one paragraph, atleast when correctly formatted.\\\\

This is my second paragraph. It contains more text about other things, and it should be enough as an example.

Now, this feels quite illegal, as I have no real control about the space between the paragraphs. While researching the correct term for paragraphs, I've found \par, but I am unsure if it is the solution.

Any ideas?