Repeating key words is an important technique for gaining coherence. To prevent repetitions from becoming dull, you can use variations of the key word (hike, hiker, hiking), pronouns referring to the word (gamblers . . . they), and synonyms (run, spring, race, dash).

In the following paragraph describing plots among indentured servants in the seventeenth century, historian Richard Hofstadter binds sentences together by repeating the key word plots and echoing it with variations (highlighted in color).

Plots hatched by several servants to run away together occurred mostly in the plantation colonies, and the few recorded servant uprisings were entirely limited to those colonies. Virginia had been forced from its very earliest years to take stringent steps against mutinous plots, and severe punishments for such behavior were recorded. Most servant plots occurred in the seventeenth century: a contemplated uprising was nipped in the bud in York County in 1661; apparently led by some left-wing offshoots of the Great Rebellion, servants plotted an insurrection in Gloucester County in 1663, and four leaders were condemned and executed; some discontented servants apparently joined Bacon’s Rebellion in the 1670’s. In the 1680’s the planters became newly apprehensive of discontent among the servants “owing to their great necessities and want of clothes,” and it was feared they would rise up and plunder the storehouses and ships; in 1682 there were plantcutting riots in which servants and laborers, as well as some planters, took part.

—Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750