Repeating ourselves...

Today I sat in the back of a room and listened to several men describe the people who worked for them. They used terms and phrases that if used them once a month would sound excellent, but hearing them over and over and over and over, sometimes in exactly the same inflection, in the span of a single day was an eye-opening reminder of the traps managers fall into. A person is a person is a person. There are things they know about their own lives that shape whether they have a good day, a shitty day, a boring day, a fruitless day, a sad day, an anxious day, a day in which nothing and everything gets done, or a simple day of labor toiled so that food could be put on a table. None of them should be expected to fit into a slender definition of worker effectiveness.

But I digress. In the latest chapter in Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark he talks about repetition. That was something I learned over time. I wish I knew what I did when I wrote my first book. It is so easy during that first draft to repeat words and I normally don't catch the repetition in my first edit. It is only in the edit I do where I read the words out loud that I catch them all.