Repeating a word or phrase can have positive advantages, alongside the negative virtue of averting confusion. It can serve to emphasise ideas and drive a point home, and to link two separate ideas by signposting their similarity or contrast. And it can produce a number of rhetorical effects as well –Such as humour, persuasiveness, or a sense of nostalgia. Many sentences derive their force from skilful repetition of a key word, such as special in the following example:
The special effects are stunning, but they are the only thing special about the film.
In the following extract, from an article on the fate of soccer in the U.S., the writer uses repetition very effectively to convey his amused frustration and mock-urgency-note specifically the repetition of
Well-mannered and the chant-like refrain of we need…
The American players, for example, were describedin the press as well-mannered.
How can you get the ink necessary for success in sports by being well-mannered?
We need heated arguments on the field between participants and officials, like in baseball…
We need blood, like in hockey…
We need bruising collisions, like in [American] football, and a proper amount of concussions per game.
-Ira Berkow (U.S.), The New York Times
Finally, two passages –one from fiction, one from non-fiction-in which the writer chooses each time to repeat a person’s name rather than always using the expected pronouns he and him.
Mr Kelada was chatty. He talked of New York and of San Francisco… Mr Kelada was familiar. I do not wish to put on airs, but I cannot help feeling that it is seemly in a total stranger to put mister before my name when the addresses me. Mr Kelada, doubtless to set me at my ease, used no such formality.
I did not like Mr Kelada,
-Somerset Maugham, ‘Mr Know-All’
In April 1982, Greek-born Dimitris Sgouros walked on to the platform of Carnegie Hall, New York and made his American debut playing Rachmaninoff’s awesome 3rd piano Concerto,a massive work which stands at the peak of the romantic virtuoso tradition.
Sgouros totally dominated its technical demands . Sgouros was twelve years old.
-Robin Ray, ‘Infant Prodigies’,
Theatre programme note.
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