Cheryl Smith
Baruch College
Unlocking the Mystery of Key Terms
Key terms are the one or two or three specific words, images, or phrases that underpin your main
idea and communicate your main message or feeling about that idea. You can use key terms to
remind your reader of your main idea without having to repeatedly state it, in its entirety, over and
over again. That is, key terms help you show, not tell, your main point through recurring but subtle
words and images.
To work well, your key terms should communicate something meaningful, specific, and compelling
about the central point of your essay. If you’re writing about a woman’s choice to have children,
“motherhood” itself is too broad to be a key term. But the “challenges of motherhood” or “say yes
to motherhood” begin to point toward a specific focus on the topic and could be key terms. If your
topic is death and grief, “grief” is too broad. “Surviving grief” is similarly broad. And “life goes
on” is trite. HOW do you survive grief? What’s the process to coming to know that “life goes on”?
What part of the process do you want to highlight? You need something that suggests a specific
angle on grief, such as: separation anxiety, surprised by grief, renewal, and so forth.
To help you define and use key terms to make your main idea apparent to your readers (and even to
yourself!), consider the following questions and answers as you work key terms into your writing:
How many key terms are enough (too many)?
Your essay should have at least one or two key terms that are evocative and potentially have
multiple meanings or interpretations. If you can identify upwards of five or six key terms, you might
be muddling your argument with too many. After all, how many basic oppositions, assumptions, or
defining ideas can one essay have (before it’s trying to do too much)?
How do I pick a key term?
A key term needs to be an important and rich contributor to your essay’s main idea. It should not be
a flat, easily definable word that is important to your essay simply because you will be using the
word a lot in laying out your evidence or telling your story. Rather, a key term has resonance; it’s a
word or phrase or concept that contributes to the very core of what you want to say: the point—or
feeling—you want to leave with a reader. If you’re writing about death and grief, a key term might
be separation anxiety, which implies a lot about a certain approach toward grief and could be
evaluated and reflected upon to send one very particular message about grief. Renewal, resisting
death, or surprised by grief would also all work as key terms for an essay on grief. Each would send
very different messages and force you to contend with what you want your particular point to be.
Don’t try to evade your point or the idea of a point. You have one; you HAVE to have one. Figure
it out. It’s too easy to say: I don’t have a point, or, this just is what it is. You do (have a point), and
it isn’t “just” anything. If you don’t have a point (or can’t name it) and it is “just what it is,” leave it
in your diary and find something else to write about because it isn’t likely to be very interesting to a
reader.
Cheryl Smith
Baruch College
What’s the difference between using a key term and just repeating a word—which I thought you
weren’t supposed to do?
In general, you don’t want to repeat a word or phrase within the same few lines or a paragraph,
unless you are using repetition consciously for emphasis. Such word repetition tends to sound
inelegant and choppy. So a writer has to find good synonyms or other ways to avoid unnecessary
repetition.
Even key terms should not be mechanically repeated simply to make them apparent. Key terms
should be used consistently throughout an essay at key points to signal to your reader that you just
made or are about to make an important claim. Since key terms are the recurring terms or basic
oppositions that an argument rests upon, they signal Main Idea! to your reader. Thus, they allow
you to signpost back to your main idea more subtly and elegantly, without having to repeat your
entire point again and again, which can get clunky (at best) or preachy (at worst). Pepper key terms
throughout your essay as they come up in relation to different points you make. As you develop
their meaning by putting them in the new contexts that your evidence and analysis allow, you show
your reader how your entire idea is evolving (in tandem with your evolving key terms).
How do I make my key terms stand out to my reader?
Key terms should be essential to your main idea; therefore, you often want to introduce them in
your introduction or early in your essay. Sometimes, you can use a source or statistic to help set
up a key term. By using a source to flesh out the meaning of a key term, you are spending enough
time on the term to signal its importance. Or, you can rhetorically rest on a key term by following
it with a brief definition or elaboration the first time you introduce the term. You might say:
“After three years, I suddenly experienced an abiding sense of renewal—the conviction that, even
though I was irrevocably changed by grief, such change did not only diminish me; it was also
generative. I was recreated and released into a new age of my life. The darkest part of my grief had
passed.” Setting off an elaboration of the term with commas or dashes slows down the rhythm of
your prose, gently prodding the reader to keep the term in mind. You can similarly prod the reader
to notice the significance of a term if you put it in a question (e.g. “Can anyone possibly anticipate
the renewal of grief? Find comfort in this expectation?”). Another way to signal a key term is to
incorporate it in your title or an epigraph, which clearly privileges the term. And one final
suggestion: use key terms as the very first or last word in an early paragraph (and perhaps again
in a closing paragraph). Such positioning subtly but powerfully privileges the key term.