Welcome to WORDS ON THE LINE's 1,110th post in nearly 19 years! There is still a lot to say about writing.
Why is repetition often powerful in political speeches and dramatic writing but usually useless in business and technical writing?
I wrote about the value of repetition in a 2020 post as if I were a fan of repetitive phrasing. In that post, I explain the value of repetition with two examples from politics (Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and Winston Churchill's "We Shall Fight in the Beaches" speech), and two from fiction (the openings of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground).
In this post, I refer to John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a Berliner") speech of June 26, 1963 at the Berlin Wall. What remains of the Wall that separated West and East Berlin stands as an outdoor art gallery in a unified country. In the space of only 80 words, Kennedy said, "Let them come to Berlin" four times, or 25% of that part of the speech. Hearing the enthusiastic response of 120,000 people in Rudolph Wilde Platz that day offers sufficient proof that Kennedy's use of repetition was powerful.
Churchill, Kennedy, and King use repetition to inspire their audience. Dickens uses the same technique to establish the settings of London and Paris, and Dostoevsky uses repetition to introduce us to the emotional state of the unnamed main character. All five examples achieve the intended results.
The benefits of repetition are far less for a business writer composing an internal proposal or instructional message. Good technical writers also avoid repetition when describing an incident or detailing laboratory results. On the other hand, repetition may help an employee write a farewell speech to colleagues. Here is an example of repetition serving two purposes: to demand the writer always remember four coworkers and to remind his audience to always remember them:
I'll always remember Arthur for expressing confidence in my analytical and communication skills when he hired me. I'll always remember Paul for teaching me so much about my craft. I'll always remember Suzanne for seeing my leadership potential when she promoted me to supervisor. I'll always remember Tom for exuding patience with my professional development.
Using your software's read-aloud feature to listen for repetition or reading aloud yourself will help you detect useless repetitive phrasing. Here's an example from one of my students, who discovered useless repetition in the opening sentence of his proposal only when he read it aloud:
"Since we are experiencing more production errors after losing three key staff members from our unit, we request the hiring of an additional three new analysts to reduce production errors."
Upon hearing the repetition of the beginning and ending, the writer reduced the 30-word sentence to 14:
"Hiring three analysts to replace those who left our unit will reduce production errors."
Read aloud to discover wordiness you might not in a silent reading.
