Paragraph Matching in Python
A few tips for leaner code:


Use enumerate while iterating when you need the index, to avoid the sequential search and extra verbosity of orParas.index(orPara). For example the last loop becomes

for orIndex, orPara in enumerate(orParas):
    matchSet.insert(orIndex + shifter, (orIndex + shifter, "-"))

max(matchTuples) achieves the same as sorted(matchTuples, key = lambda tup: tup[0])[-1] and avoids sorting. You could even give a key argument to max, but tuples are sorted item by item anyway, and here the second item is an ascending integer, so including it in the sort key does not change the order.
Unpacking bestRatio, bestIndex = max(matchTuples) improves readability as you can use bestRatio instead of bestMatch[0] in the code that follows.