Repetition, Repetition, Repetition and other Rhetorical Devices.

I’m doing double duty on my current WIP — finishing the book at the same time that I’m starting from chapter one on editing and polishing.  And while I see where my writing has improved, I can also see my weaknesses. One thing that is a constant source of irritation for me is repetition in words.  And lo and behold, there are actually a number of terms for this!  (Who knew.)

One is called Elegant Variation, which basically means avoiding the use of notable words — words that stand out in the reader’s mind.  Well, I’m not so elegant at the variation, at least not in first (or second) drafts.  And often times, it takes my critique partners pointing out that sentence that was ten words long and four of them were the same. (A bit of an exaggeration…maybe.)

Repetition is not always a bad thing. At times, it can be used as a rhetorical device.  Margie Lawson teaches it as one of a number of ways to create tension and interest in your manuscript, along with over 20 other rhetorical devices.

According to wikipedia, there are about nine different variations of repetition. There is an actual name for repeating words at the beginning of a clause (anaphora), one for repeating at the end (epistrophe),  repeating words in the middle (Mesodiplosis) and…okay, really, who needs all the names?   I certainly don’t need any rhetorical device reasoning to add repetition to my WIP, but I have to admit, the names of rhetorical devices are pretty fascinating.  We have names from Alliteration to Zeugma. Certainly makes one wonder where they came up with these things.

But I digress… back to my dilemma.  (Does this qualify as alliteration?) At times in my first drafts, the repetition is on purpose — for instance, “She looked at him” is an overused phrase and means little in the scope of nonverbal communication.  But it’s quick and simple and proves a great placeholder to allow me to move on, with the understanding that I’ll come back on draft #2 (or 3) to fix it.

But what about coming back to Draft #2? Finding repetition of words can be tough if you don’t know what to look for.  So I found two ways of helping me kick the problem.

First, I make a running list of words I know I overuse or phrases I know need to be killed.  Examples:

• anything with -ly
• again
• almost
• as
• back
• believed
• consider
• expression
• eyes
• eyebrows
• face
• fairly
• gaze
• glance
• hesitate
• just
• little
• look
• more
• now
• pause
• pretty
• quite
• rather
• really
• regardless
• seems
• sigh
• surprise
• time
• that
• thing
• thought
• though
• very
• way

I find that some of my worst offenders come in nonverbal action — in my first draft, characters can do a lot of glancing, gazing, sighing or raising their eyebrows.  So that’s usually the first runthrough of items to fix.

Then I do a word “find” on the list of words above.  Once that is done, I go to my new favorite auto editing tool, Auto Crit.  This software is some of the best money I’ve ever spent on writing.  It helps with:

• Overused Words & Phrases
• Repeated Words & Phrases
• Slow Pacing
• Dull Sentence Structure
• Clichés & Redundancies
• Incorrect Homonyms
• Incorrect Readability Levels
• Overused Dialogue Tags

Truly I love this website. I can copy/paste my work into it and come back with a report.  It’s like a little Robot critique partner. If I can fix these things before my work ever hits my human critique partners, they can concentrate more on story and less on how many times I’ve repeated the word “fabulous.”

So, what’s your worst rhetorical device? Your favorite? What do you find overused in your first drafts?