ClearTips: Powerful paragraphs

Repeat an opening word or phrase

Repeating an opening word or phrase at the beginning of paragraphs propels your argument across two or more of them.

Banks' credit-risk models are mind-bogglingly complex. But the question they try to answer is actually quite simple: how much of a bank's lending might plausibly turn bad? Armed with the answer, banks can set aside enough capital to make sure they stay solvent should the worst happen.
     No model, of course can take account of every possibility. Credit-risk models try to put a value on how much a bank should realistically expect to lose in the 99.9% or so of the time that passes for normality. This requires estimating three different things: the likelihood that any given borrower will default; the amount that might be recoverable if that happened; and the likelihood that the borrower will default at the same time others are doing so.

The repeated opening also tells readers that the paragraphs are doing similar work—that the second paragraph adds to or elaborates on the point of the first.

Small wonder, then, that such a variety of insects and plants were unwittingly trapped in the stickiness and thereby preserved, fragmentary DNA and all. The exhibition's 200-odd fossil marvels include entombed ants, a frog, a scorpion, a perfect flower and a yet-to-be-revealed mystery item that Dr Grimaldi discovered recently in New Jersey.
     Small wonder, too, that amber has long had cultural significance. Though not especially rare (many trees exuded great gouts of the stuff) it is both attractive and easy to work. Amber has been carved since the Stone Age into symbolic figures and used as currency. The Greeks and Romans alike were fascinated by its weightless luminosity. In recent years the Baltic amber that was expensively transported across Europe to the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago has become ubiquitous as a cheap jewel, exported now as earrings and brooches by modern Balts as desperate as their forebears for trade.

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