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VIII. Effective Sentences (Chapters 38-42) |
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Parallelism is normally thought of as showing relationships between sentences or between parts of sentences. But it can also be used with larger stretches of text, for example to link two or more paragraphs. Consider this example from Antonio Ramirez's essay about cloning. After his opening paragraph, Antonio devotes two paragraphs to arguments that people have made against cloning:
"Many theologians argue that clones would violate human dignity, but as Ruth Macklin points out, this would only be true if society treated clones as 'lesser beings,' with fewer rights and lower status. . ."Many people fear the fact that people will make clones in order to take the organs they need from them to survive life-threatening diseases. . . "
By starting each of these paragraphs with topic sentences in the same grammatical pattern, Antonio makes it clear to the reader that he is presenting a list of some sort, in this case two distinct arguments against cloning.
Look for opportunities in your own writing to link paragraphs like this.
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