In this short story, Dorris Lessing describes a fifteen year old boy who goes hunting every morning. One day the boy notices a buck that is wounded. It was about to die. This scene continues in the story with the following sentences: "It came into his mind that he should shoot it and end its pain; and he raised the gun. Then he lowered it again."
In composition, unity is the quality of oneness in a paragraph or essay that results when all the words and sentences contribute to a single effect or main idea. Also called wholeness.
For the past two centuries, composition handbooks have insisted that unity is an essential characteristic of an effective text. Professor Andy Crockett points out that the "five-paragraph theme and current-traditional rhetoric's emphasis on method reflect further the expediency and utility of unity." However, Crockett also notes that "for rhetoricians, the achievement of unity has never been taken for granted" (Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition, 1996).
