Blogger: Mary Keeley
Location: Books & Such Midwest Office, Illinois
This being Black Friday, you may be tired and full from your Thanksgiving feast and strategizing your route for your Christmas shopping blitz. So I’ll offer you a quick reminder about how to make your writing bloom afresh with easy to spot but often overlooked repetition of words.
Here’s a paragraph for you to read:
As you craft your article, story, or chapter, watch how frequently you use different forms of the same word within a sentence, paragraph, or even a printed page. Thoughtful crafting of fresh words will avoid redundancy. Carefully choose fresh words rather than repeating a word in a different form. These new words will add depth and color and will not dilute the power of the original word.
What redundancies did you spot in the previous paragraph?
In his book, Writing Tools, Roy Peter Clark calls this word territory. The chapter in which he covers this topic is aptly entitled, “Give key words their space.” For some reason—I think it goes back to a great English teacher I had in high school—I am on the alert for this kind of repetition. But even so, these occurrences get overlooked more often than I’d like to think.
One simple solution to repetition in the sample paragraph is to change craft to write. But with a little more thought you can come up with a more interesting word or descriptive phrase. And notice how the word crafting is more prominent when not sharing the paragraph with the second form of the word.
Of course, there are rare instances when you want to be redundant for emphasis.
She searched up town, down town, and all around the town.
Take a look at your WIP or something you have written recently to look for word redundancies.
Does it surprise you that you hadn’t noticed these the first time around?
Are you prone to overuse a particular word? If so, what can you do to avoid wearing out that word?
Just for fun, do you see words in my blog that I’ve worn down to the nub?
I use wordle.net to look for repeat offenders. You can plug any quantity of text into Wordle and it will make a word collage of it. The larger the words, the more often they’ve been used. In my first manuscript I used “little” and “just” waaaay too often. And Wordle made it fun to root them out!
Thanks for this thought-provoking post. Word redundancy is one of my pet peeves in writing as well. I’m constantly amazed at how many books contain these mistakes when with a minimum of effort the sentences could have easily been rewritten to avoid the repetition. Keep up the good work on behalf of your authors as well as all of us readers!
I also use wordle – too fun that way! And I am so so so VERY guilty of this! Uuuuggghhh! Thanks for the post!
Always amazed how often “that” shows up in my writing. Even when I think I’m being conscious of it, I have learned it is worth a quick word search to make sure if it is there, it needs to be.
You used word or words six times in that first paragraph.