Writing with Cohesion: Repeating Key Nouns

What is cohesion?

Repeating key nouns

Review A

Review B

• its parts stick together to form a unified whole.

• its ideas are connected in a way that makes sense.

Writing has cohesion if

What is cohesion?

If writing is cohesive, the reader can easily follow the writer’s thoughts and understand his or her message.

Repeating key nouns

One way that writers achieve cohesion is by repeating key nouns.

There was such a mass of jewels as one had never dreamed could be together, jewels red as the inner flesh of watermelons.

Notice the repetition of the key noun jewels in this description from The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.

Repeating key nouns

The same strategy can unite whole paragraphs.

Now the anger that arose in Wang Lung’s heart was an anger he had not known in all his life before, although as things had prospered with him and asmen 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.

Here is how Buck repeats the key noun anger to describe the main character’s state of mind:

Now the anger that arose in Wang Lung’s heart was an anger that he had not known in all his life before, although as things had prospered with him and asmen came to call him rich he . . . had grown full of small angers, and he was proud even in the town. But his anger now was the anger of one man againstanother man who steals away the loved woman.

Now the anger that arose in Wang Lung’s heart was a rage that he had not known in all his life before, although as things had prospered with him and asmen came to call him rich he . . . had grown full of small hatreds, and he was proud even in the town. But his ire now was the fury of one man againstanother 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.

Repeating key nouns

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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.

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 person’s 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 itfor many months together, when spring came each year he must go out on to his land.

The End