ClearTips: Powerful paragraphs

Repeat a key term

Once you've rid a paragraph of extraneous material, try repeating a key word or phrase to bind the sentences even more. Many writers have an aversion to repetition, something they generally acquire in the seventh grade. But using different terms for the same idea simply to avoid repetition will confuse your reader.

In this example, repeating the term Mother's Day ties the four sentences together.

On Mother's Day this year MCI, America's second-largest long-distance telephone company, offered many of its domestic customers free calls. Struck by an annual outbreak of filial sentiment, Americans make more long-distance calls on Mother's Day than on any other day of the year. Americans also have almost a quarter of the world's telephone lines, so Mother's Day traffic in the United States is probably the heaviest anywhere in the world. Yet MCI felt it could offer a free service on Mother's Day without overloading its network.

The next version, by contrast, is loose—because it avoids repetition. The use of that day is fine in the second sentence, tying it to the first. But the third has no tie to Mother's Day, weakening the attempted link of this holiday in the fourth.

On Mother's Day this year MCI, America's second-largest long-distance telephone company, offered many of its domestic customers free calls. Struck by an annual outbreak of filial sentiment, Americans make more long-distance calls on that day than on any other day of the year. Americans also have almost a quarter of the world's telephone lines, so traffic in the United States is probably the heaviest anywhere in the world. Yet MCI felt it could offer a free service on this holiday without overloading its network.

Repeating more than one word can create a resounding echo:

In Europe's first integration at the hands of bureaucratic Roman imperialists these quickening virtues had been stifled and therein lay the seeds of the empire's dissolution. Therein too lay the kernel of an oblique message for Gibbon's contemporaries. And our contemporaries too?

The repetition of therein and lay ties the second sentence to the first, and the repetition of too and contemporaries ties the third to the second.

For 34 years he lived in the uneasy crucible of Congress, first tasting the frustrations of powerlessness and then exercising the prerogatives of power. He took his lessons through the haze of Camel cigarettes and over the bourbon and branch water that flowed in Sam Rayburn's secret hideaway. He took others from another master of leadership, Lyndon B. Johnson. Later, he dispensed lessons of his own, and sometimes they were lessons in brutal partisanship; his Republican rivals learned them not wisely but too well.

In the paragraph above, the subject of each sentence, he, ties all four sentences together. The repetition of took ties the third sentence to the second, and that of lessons ties the fourth.

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