As an editor, on of the most common problems I see in the writing of my valued clients is needless repetition.

This manifests itself in either of two ways: Repeating the same idea more than once, or repeating words that add no new value to the reader and make for a boring reading experience.

Trust your words! The English language comprises a huge variety, each with its own meaning. The latest official edition of the Merriam-Webster online dictionary includes approximately 470,000 entries, while the main page of Oxford English Dictionary official website provides the figure of over 600,000 terms. By all accounts, English consists of more words than any other language. Instead of using the same words repeatedly, do your reader a favor and choose just the right one for the occasion.

Some examples of repetition are obvious. For example, consider this paragraph:

“The white house stood at the edge of a dense wood. In the sunset, the white sides seemed to glow red. In addition to the white painted walls, the trim of the house was painted yellow, and the shutters were painted red. The combination of the red, white, and yellow was very pleasing to the eye. Not many houses near the dense wood were painted white; most of them were painted red. This was perhaps because red paint was cheaper than white paint.”

You get the idea. The repetition drags down the prose.

Try this instead:

“When touched by the rays of the setting sun, the white house at the edge of the dense wood took on a crimson glow. With its yellow trim and shutters the color of burgundy wine, the structure stood apart from its neighbors, which were universally clad with inexpensive barn-red paint.”

There’s an informal rule in prose that you don’t use the same noun, verb, adjective, or adverb twice in the same paragraph. So if you describe the house as being “red,” then if you need to refer to its color again, find another way to say it without repeating the word “red.”

Having said that, there are some authors who are handsomely rewarded for repeating the same words. In the classic novel “The Road,” author Cormac McCarthy uses a basket of nouns and adjectives over and over again: cold, dark, ashes, black, night, gray. He does this deliberately to pound into your head the bleak hopelessness of the landscape. To be honest, it’s not my cup of tea, but he won the Pulitzer Prize for it, which means that plenty of smart people were impressed.

In addition, for online publication, many writers succumb to the temptation to pack their blog posts or articles with search-engine optimized (SEO) content. This simply means repeating the same key words so the Google bots will find them. This may work to improve page ranking, but it makes for an unsatisfying reading experience.

These days, every author has ready access an online thesaurus. They’re free–and a valuable resource!