An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Eleven -- I echoed echoed echoed and then reverberated

We're leaving a deeply technical chapter, and moving on to something very simple. That's what we like! It's time to talk about repetition of words, sometimes called 'echoing'. The concept is very simple: don't repeat yourself.

The demonic flan was heavy in my hands, the cursed pastry quivering with rage. It wanted to be used, to taste the sweet blood of my enemies, to fly from my hands and destroy them...

Can you see it? Of course you can. I repeated a lot of words. But the one that sticks out is 'hands'. Oh yeah, and I broke POV. But I did that because then I could say that I broke point of view with baked goods, so I can chalk that off the bucket list.

So what's the problem? It's just... clunky. When we read, some aspect of the pleasure we get is almost like when we're watching the rain or a fire: we see lots of micro variation that combines to make an emergent structure. Repetition of words messes with us because it ruins that sentence-level variety.

However, it's interesting, because when we talk about echoing we don't just mean any old words. No! For example, you can crank out conjunctions and pronouns until the possessed pastries come home and no one will care (although remember our new friend the polysyndeton from the run-ons chapter). And I did in that section, and they didn't stick out. No, it's the big four that we care about: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

What do we do? Look, you know the answer. This is the line editing technique that everyone starts with: you eliminate the duplicates. You find a word that is similar enough and you swap it out for the echoed word. In the above example I would probably replace the second 'hands' for 'grip'.

So that's it? Shortest chapter so far?

Not so fast.

The obvious rejoinder is, but I wanted to repeat myself for dramatic effect. And if you did, the simple guide is to not make it look like an accident.

I wanted to make peace with the flan. I tried, I tried, I tried. My friends assumed the padlock on my fridge was to keep me out, not it in. I begged at it through the door as it thrashed around in the crisper, pulping my cucumber and shredding my lettuce. I tried, so very hard, but in the end... I gave up.

Here I'm using repetition for emphasis. I think this works better in first than in third, because I reckon the way that a first person narrator tells a tale is more amenable to quirks of speech such as this. But that's just me; you can make it work everywhere. The idea, though, is to go all-in. Use the repetition decisively and for impact, and like anything, use it sparingly, or your text will read like a picture book.

But this, ah, you knew all this. You didn't need to read my book for this!

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So to add a tiny bit of value, I'm going to talk about a thing that I think writers do to avoid echoing, and can be just as bad: to use uncommon words.

It's so easy to pull up a thesaurus – I have one on my computer, right now, I'm sure you do too – and look for synonyms to get yourself out of your echo trouble. You are a writer, a wordsmith, a lover of speech and the magic you can perform with it... So let's perambulate to the metronomic cadence, and disgorge some iridescent articulations!

Woah there. Woah woah woah.

I'm sure you know what all those words mean, but your reader might not. So the question is, should you keep them? Is it better to vocabularize our way out of an echo than keep it?

The truth is, it's not clear. You should consider your audience's age and sophistication, and the pace of the story at that point. It's really hard though: when I researched for this piece, I found someone complaining about the use of the word 'ostentatious' which I don't consider all that, well, ostentatious. So putting myself into the shoes of a reader doesn't mean I'll know what words they know.

I think the best solution is the easiest. Find a few books which you consider to be at the level you are writing for. Read them, and keep an eye out for the big words. Look for how frequently they're being dropped in, and whether they're used in action or slower sections. This is good advice generally, by the way: it will help you be guided on other things too, like how much horror, sex, violence and pudding exorcists are appropriate in your work.

But don't sweat it too hard. You can't know everyone's vocabulary level, and if your reader is enjoying it, they'll forgive you for having to look up the odd word, and some people enjoy having their vocabulary expanded this way. A longer word that really punches hard can be something that will improve your text with little cost.

One last note: if you're worried about this, when you introduce an important technical term, explain what it means. This works particularly well for nouns. Not everyone knows what 'hauberk', 'embolism', 'albumen', or 'marmalade' means. Well, they might know that last one. You can explain it inline (I pulled on my hauberk – my chest armour – and prepared to face the demonic flan). You can use dialogue ('Hahaha! You can't eat me! My bedevilled trans fats will give you an embolism,' shrieked the possessed pudding. 'Thanks!' I replied. 'That'll look lovely in my living room.' 'You moron, an embolism is a blocked artery!'). Or you can just take a detour and exposition it there and then (I reviewed my pastry recipe, going through the glossary carefully. Albumen is the science name for the egg white. I knew this. But I'd skimmed over the bit that said that one in twenty eggs bought at the end of December are cursed, and can only be used safely in omelettes or breakfasts. No wonder no one else eats flan on New Year's Day!).

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It's the summary time. Look out for echoes. To fix, swap another word in. Be careful that you don't put in words that alienate your readers. To find out if they are, read at the level you're writing for, although don't obsess, because there is leeway here. However, for technical terms, you can explain them, and maybe you should.