Writing with Cohesion: Repeating

Key Nouns
What is cohesion?
Repeating key nouns
Review A
Review B

What is cohesion?
Writing has cohesion if
its parts stick together to
form a unified whole.
its ideas are connected in a way
that makes sense.

If writing is cohesive, the reader

can easily follow the writers
thoughts and understand his or her
message.

Repeating key nouns

One way that writers achieve cohesion is by
repeating key nouns.
Notice the repetition of the key noun jewels in this
description from The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.
There was such a mass of
jewels as one had never
dreamed could be together,
jewels red as the inner
flesh of watermelons.

Repeating key nouns

The same strategy can unite whole paragraphs.
Here is how Buck repeats the key noun anger to
describe the main characters state of mind:
Now the anger that arose in Wang Lungs heart was
an anger he had not known in all his life before,
although as things had prospered with him and as
men came to call him rich he . . . had grown full of
small sudden angers, and he was proud even in the
town. But this anger now was the anger of one man
against another man who steals away the loved
woman.

Repeating key nouns

Notice how using synonyms instead of repeating
the key noun makes the paragraph less unified.
Now the anger that arose in Wang Lungs heart was a
an
rage
anger
thatthat
he had
he had
not not
known
known
in allinhis
all life
his before,
life before,
although as things had prospered with him and as
men came to call him rich he . . . had grown full of
small hatreds,
angers, and
andhe
hewas
wasproud
proudeven
evenininthe
thetown.
town.
But his ire
anger
nownow
waswas
the the
fury
anger
of oneofman
one against
man against
another man who steals away the loved woman.

Repeating key nouns

On Your Own
For each sentence, write a second sentence that repeats a
key noun from the first.
1. Malik kept his most prized possessions in a special box.
2. To reach the other side of the canyon, travelers must
cross a rope bridge.
3. Through two years of drought, the townspeople had lived
with hunger day by day.

[End of Section]

Review A
For each sentence, write a second sentence that repeats a
key noun from the first.
1. A rusted car took up most of the front lawn.
2. Flowering pear trees line both sides of the sidewalk.
3. We chose red and white as the main colors for the decorations.
4. Hard as it is to believe in this age of jet airliners, people once
crossed the Atlantic by ship.

Review B
Using the following passage from The Good Earth as a
model, write three sentences that tell about a persons
relationship to something or someone that he or she loves.

But still one thing remained to him and it was his love
for his land. He had gone away from it and he had set
up his house in a town and he was rich. But his roots
were in his land, and although he had forgot it
for many months together, when spring came each
year he must go out on to his land.

The End