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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