(Which sentences state causes and which state effects? Would the effects which you have stated really follow the given causes?)
+50. Development by Repetition.+—The repetition of a thought in different form will often make plain that which we do not at first understand. This is especially true if the repetitions are accompanied by new comparisons. In every school the teacher makes daily use of repetition in her efforts to explain to the pupils that which they do not understand. In a similar way a writer makes use of this tendency of ours, and develops the idea of the topic sentence by repetition. Each sentence should, however, do more than merely repeat. It should add something to the central idea, making this idea clearer, more definite, or more emphatic. If repetition is excessive and purposeless, it becomes a fault.
Repetition may extend through the whole paragraph, or it may be used to explain any sentence or any part of a sentence. It may tell what the thing is or what it is not, and in effect becomes a definition setting limits to the original idea.
EXERCISE
Notice how the idea in the topic statement of each of the following paragraphs is repeated in those which follow:—
1. No man ever made a complete new system of law and gave it to a people. No monarch, however absolute or powerful, ever had the power to change the habits of a people to that extent. Revolution generally means, not a change of law, but merely a change of government officials; even when it is a change from monarchy to democracy. Our Revolution made practically no changes in the criminal and civil laws of the colonies.
—Clark: The Government.
2. People talk of liberty as if it meant the liberty to do just what a man likes. I call that man free who fears doing wrong, but fears nothing else. I call that man free who has learned the most blessed of all truths,—that liberty consists in obedience to the power, and to the will, and to the law that his higher soul reverences and approves. He is not free because he does what he likes; but he is free because he does what he ought, and there is no protest in his soul against the doing.
—Frederick William Robertson.
3. This dense forest was to the Indians a home in which they had lived from childhood, and where they were as much at ease as a farmer on his own acres. To their keen eyes, trained for generations to more than a wild beast's watchfulness, the wilderness was an open book. Nothing at rest or in motion escaped them. They had begun to track game as soon as they could walk; a scrape on a tree trunk, a bruised leaf, a faint indentation of the soil, which no white man could see, all told them a tale as plainly as if it had been shouted in their ears.