I just happened to be reading "A Law of Acceleration" by Henry Adams and have come across two paragraphs that have some relation to what we have been discussed on the issue of varying sentence openings and coherence.

The first paragraph begins with "Thus" and the sentence concludes "only the mathematician could help."  Here are the first words (NPs) of the remaining six sentences:

            La Place

            Watt

            Volta and Benjamin Franklin

            Dalton

            Napoleon I

            No one

The other starts with the word "Nothing."  The remaining five sentences begin:

            Thought

            Power

            Man

            Forces

            So long as the rates of progress held good, . . . .

Comments?

Ed S

Can I throw in a question here?  The revised version seems to me to create a new problem... we have only one sentence with a varying start now, and in it, the subject is a pronoun referring back to an adjective in the previous sentence.  I realize that this phenomenon is acceptable in spoken speech and probably happens a lot in writing, but I'm wondering if others out there teaching would point this out to students or let it go... <Landon is comparing Jamie’s weight to leaves falling.  She has become so sick that she has lost a lot of weight, and he has really started to notice it.>   It seems to me that *she* would work well if Landon were female; alternately, one might begin the second sentence with *Jamie* and solve the problem, as the 2nd *she* would then be clear.   Curious what others think -- --Jordan

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