Richard
Nordquist is a freelance writer and former professor of English and Rhetoric
who wrote college-level Grammar and Composition textbooks.
Updated July
07, 2019
An important
quality of an effective paragraph is unity. A unified paragraph sticks to one topic
from start to finish, with every sentence contributing to the central purpose and main idea of that paragraph.
But a strong
paragraph is more than just a collection of loose sentences. Those sentences
need to be clearly connected so that readers can follow along, recognizing how
one detail leads to the next. A paragraph with clearly connected sentences is
said to be cohesive.
Repetition of Key Words
Repeating
keywords in a paragraph is an important technique for achieving cohesion. Of
course, careless or excessive repetition is boring—and a source of clutter. But used skillfully and selectively, as
in the paragraph below, this technique can hold sentences together and focus
the reader's attention on a central idea.
We Americans
are a charitable and humane people: we have institutions devoted to every good
cause from rescuing homeless cats to preventing World War III. But what have we
done to promote the art of thinking? Certainly we make no room for thought
in our daily lives. Suppose a man were to say to his friends, "I'm not
going to PTA tonight (or choir practice or the baseball game) because I need
some time to myself, some time to think"? Such a man would be
shunned by his neighbors; his family would be ashamed of him. What if a
teenager were to say, "I'm not going to the dance tonight because I need
some time to think"? His parents would immediately start looking in
the Yellow Pages for a psychiatrist. We are all too much like Julius Caesar: we
fear and distrust people who think too much. We believe that almost
anything is more important than thinking.
(Carolyn Kane, from "Thinking: A Neglected Art." Newsweek, December 14, 1981)
(Carolyn Kane, from "Thinking: A Neglected Art." Newsweek, December 14, 1981)
Notice that the
author uses various forms of the same word—think, thinking, thought—to
link the different examples and reinforce the main idea of the paragraph. (For
the benefit of budding rhetoricians, this device is called polyptoton.)
Repetition of Key Words and Sentence Structures
A similar way
to achieve cohesion in our writing is to repeat a particular sentence structure
along with a keyword or phrase. Although we usually try to vary the length and shape of our sentences, now
and then we may choose to repeat a construction to emphasize connections
between related ideas.
Here's a short
example of structural repetition from the play Getting Married by George
Bernard Shaw:
There are
couples who dislike one another furiously for several hours at a time; there
are couples who dislike one another permanently; and there are couples who
never dislike one another; but these last are people who are incapable of
disliking anybody.
Notice how
Shaw's reliance on semicolons (rather than periods) reinforces the
sense of unity and cohesion in this passage.
Extended Repetition
On rare
occasions, emphatic repetitions may extend beyond just two or three main clauses. Not long ago, the Turkish novelist
Orhan Pamuk provided an example of extended repetition (specifically, the
device called anaphora) in his Nobel Prize Lecture, "My Father's
Suitcase":
The question we
writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I
write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal
work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I
write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting
in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by
changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort
of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because
I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in
literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I
write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being
forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I
write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so
very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write
because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I
write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish
belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the
shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches
into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because
I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but— as in a
dream— can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be
happy. I write to be happy.
(The Nobel Lecture, 7 December 2006. Translated from the Turkish, by Maureen Freely. The Nobel Foundation 2006)
Two well-known
examples of extended repetition appear in our Essay Sampler: Judy Brady's essay
"Why I Want a Wife" (included in part three of the Essay Sampler) and
the most famous portion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.
Final Reminder: Needless
repetition that only clutters our writing should be avoided. But the careful
repetition of keywords and phrases can be an effective strategy for fashioning
cohesive paragraphs
www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
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Catfishing
From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Catfishing is a type of deceptive activity where a person creates a
sock puppet
social networking
presence, or fake identity on a social network account,
usually targeting a specific victim for deception.
Catfishing is
often employed for romance scams on
dating websites. Catfishing may be used for financial gain, to compromise a
victim in some way, or simply as a form of trolling or wish fulfillment.
Catfishing
media has been produced, often centering around victims who wish to identify
their catfisher
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