From "Neat People vs. Sloppy People"

Suzanne Britt

  1. Sloppy people live in Never-Never land.

  2. Someday is their metier.

  3. Someday they are planning to alphaetize all their books and set up home catalogs.

  4. Someday they will go through their wardobes and mark certain items for tentative mending and certain items for passing on to relatives of similar shape and size.

  5. Someday sloppy people will make family scrapbooks into which they will put newspaper clippings, postcards, locks of hair, and the dried corsage from their senior prom.

  6. Someday they wil file everything on the surface of their desks, including the cash recipts from coffee purchases at the snack shop.

  7. Someday they will sit down and red all the back issues of the New Yorker(Britt, Buscemi and Smith 7th ed. 231).

In this paragraph there are seven sentences, two key terms, and thirty-one links. Although the density of information is not nearly so great as in the preceeding examples, the overall coherence as measured by the number of links between sentences created by repeated terms and pronoun reference is far greater. This fact can be attributed to the parallel structure of the sentences. The repeated words and sentence patterns create a partial identity among the sentences. The rhetorical effect of this identity is to emphasize the repeated concept while reducing the overall information load.

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