I think early patches of the game used to read the descriptions you put in (hence some mods that evolved still have them there)

the game now works so that the abilities are automatically listed from the attributes in the EDU file. When that change was made the RTW .exe seems to have been changed so it doesn't pick up the first paragraph of the description - probably a lazy way of not changing the text files

To get your 'first' paragraph to show up you just need to use \n\n before the first word.