Definition:
An instance of using a word, phrase, or clause more than once in a short passage--dwelling on a point.
Needless or unintentional repetition (a tautology or pleonasm) is a kind of clutter that may distract or bore a reader.
Used deliberately, repetition can be an effective rhetorical strategy for achieving emphasis. See the different types of rhetorical repetition below.
See also:
- Broken-Record Response
- Cohesion Strategies: Repetition of Key Words & Structures
- Echo Utterance
- Effective Rhetorical Strategies of Repetition
- Elegant Variation
- Hemingway's Use of Repetition
- Monologophobia
- "Punctuation in Prose," by Gertrude Stein
- Semantic Satiation
- Sentence Variety
- Wordiness
- Would You Repeat That, Please?
Types of Rhetorical Repetition With Examples:
- Anadiplosis
Repetition of the last word of one line or clause to begin the next.
"My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain."
(William Shakespeare, Richard III) - Anaphora
Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses.
"I want her to live. I want her to breathe. I want her to aerobicize."
(Weird Science, 1985) - Antistasis
Repetition of a word in a different or contrary sense.
"A kleptomaniac is a person who helps himself because he can't help himself."
(Henry Morgan) - Commoratio
Emphasizing a point by repeating it several times in different words.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
(Douglass Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979) - Diacope
Repetition broken up by one or more intervening words.
"A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
And no one can talk to a horse of course
That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mister Ed."
(Theme song of 1960s TV program Mr. Ed) - Epanalepsis
Repetition at the end of a clause or sentence of the word or phrase with which it began.
"Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow,
How can thine heart be full of the spring?"
(Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Itylus") - Epimone
Frequent repetition of a phrase or question; dwelling on a point.
"And I looked upwards, and there stood a man upon the summit of the rock; and I hid myself among the water-lilies that I might discover the actions of the man. . . .
"And the man sat upon the rock, and leaned his head upon his hand, and looked out upon the desolation. . . . And I lay close within shelter of the lilies, and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude;--but the night waned, and he sat upon the rock."
(Edgar Allan Poe, "Silence")
"The man who stood, who stood on sidewalks, who stood facing streets, who stood with his back against store windows or against the walls of buildings, never asked for money, never begged, never put his hand out."
(Gordon Lish, "Sophistication") - Epiphora
Repetition of a word or phrase at the end of several clauses.
"She's safe, just like I promised. She's all set to marry Norrington, just like she promised. And you get to die for her, just like you promised."
(Jack Sparrow, The Pirates of the Caribbean) - Epizeuxis
Repetition of a word or phrase for emphasis, usually with no words in between.
"If you think you can win, you can win."
(William Hazlitt)
"Will you ever be old and dumb, like your creepy parents?
Not you, not you, not you, not you, not you, not you."
(Donald Hall, "To a Waterfowl." White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006. Houghton Mifflin, 2006) - Gradatio
A sentence construction in which the last word of one clause becomes the first of the next, through three or more clauses (an extended form of anadiplosis).
"To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly."
(Henri Bergson) - Negative-Positive Restatement
A method of achieving emphasis by stating an idea twice, first in negative terms and then in positive terms.
"Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality."
(James Baldwin) - Ploce
Repetition of a word with a new or specified sense, or with pregnant reference to its special significance.
"If it wasn't in Vogue, it wasn't in vogue."
(promotional slogan for Vogue magazine) - Polyptoton
Repetition of words derived from the same root but with different endings.
"I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best."
(George W. Bush, April 2006) - Symploce
Repetition of words or phrases at both the beginning and end of successive clauses or verses: a combination of anaphora and epiphora.
"They are not paid for thinking--they are not paid to fret about the world's concerns. They were not respectable people--they were not worthy people--they were not learned and wise and brilliant people--but in their breasts, all their stupid lives long, resteth a peace that passeth understanding!"
(Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1869)
Observations:
- "[R]epetition skulks under numerous different names, one might almost say aliases, depending on who is repeating what where:
When parrots do it, it's parrotting.
In sum, the following alphabetical list of 27 terms covers repetition's commonest guises, though there are undoubtedly more to be found in specialized areas such as classical rhetoric:
When advertisers do it, it's reinforcement.
When children do it, it's imitation.
When brain-damaged people do it, it's perseveration or echolalia.
When disfluent people do it, it's stuttering or stammering.
When orators do it, it's epizeuxis, ploce, anadiplosis, polyptoton or antimetabole.
When novelists do it, it's cohesion.
When poets do it, it's alliteration, chiming, rhyme, or parallelism.
When priests do it, it's ritual.
When sounds do it, it's gemination.
When morphemes do it, it's reduplication.
When phrases do it, it's copying.
When conversations do it, it's reiteration.Alliteration, anadiplosis, antimetabole, assonance, battology, chiming, cohesion, copying, doubling, echolalia, epizeuxis, gemination, imitation, iteration, parallelism, parrotting, perseveration, ploce, polyptoton, reduplication, reinforcement, reiteration, rhyme, ritual, shadowing, stammering, stuttering
As the numerous names suggest, repetition covers an enormous area. In one sense, the whole of linguistics can be regarded as the study of repetition, in that language depends on repeated patterns."
(Jean Aitchison, "'Say, Say It Again Sam': The Treatment of Repetition in Linguistics." Repetition, ed. by Andreas Fischer. Gunter Narr Verlag, 1994) - "Repetition is a far less serious fault than obscurity. Young writers are often unduly afraid of repeating the same word, and require to be reminded that it is always better to use the right word over again, than to replace it by a wrong one--and a word which is liable to be misunderstood is a wrong one. A frank repetition of a word has even sometimes a kind of charm--as bearing the stamp of truth, the foundation of all excellence of style."
(Theophilus Dwight Hall, A Manual of English Composition. John Murray, 1880)
