Hey Writer Person

Hey Writer Person ✍️ - Catching Echoes

Hey Writer Person,

How bout a Writing Tips and Tricks spotlight? It's a little one, but it helped me improve the flow of my writing immensely.

I call it catching echoes, but I dunno what it's really called. Anywho, you know those words you just LOVE? Or words you might not even think much about, they're just the first ones that come to your mind when search for the perfect way to say something? Once upon a time, a long time ago, the first editor I ever worked with marked up my manuscript with Rs circled in red. The R stood for repetition and she put it there because I was repeating myself all over the place.

Watch for them, Writer Person. When you're going over your work, keep an eye out for how many times you use a word on a page. Obviously, you have to repeat some words. BUT watch for how far apart they are. Read your page outloud, sometimes that helps you hear the repetition, hear the way it breaks up the flow. Here's a REALLY clunky example:

Sarah went to the doctor. The doctor's name was Doctor Smith. Sarah hated going to the Doctor.

Doctor appears like a thousand times!!!!! It's echoing all over the place. Try and remove as many 'doctors' as possible. So:

Sarah hated seeing Doctor Smith. She went anyway.

Look, this isn't Shakespeare, but the problem has been solved -- the echoes are gone, and the point comes across.

Wanna try, Writer Person? I hope this is helpful in your own writing. It was HUGELY helpful to me -- and I'm still guilty of repeating myself too much. But I try my best to catch it when I do.

 If you'd like to catch the echoes in the sentence below, give it a go! Feel free to post your fix in the comments!

Sarah liked baseball but the baseball season was cancelled because of the baseball-hating aliens. No one knew when the anti-baseball aliens would leave, so no one knew when baseball would be back.