Repetition Can Be A Good Thing

I have just read a blog post by Steve Pavlina.  In it he goes over some stuff that he has done before adding no new information, just putting it into a new set of words.  In a sense this post is superfluous because you can get the same information in his previous work.  We tend to put a premium on originality and creativity so seeing someone trotting out the same old is not supposedly a good thing at all.


But here is a case where the prevailing wisdom is wrong.  Repetition can be a good thing, and is often the only way to get something across.  I realised the benefits of it when I left school and realised that my grasp of grammar was poor.  This was not, in fairness, the fault of my particular school or the school system  in any but the most general of ways.  I had been taught the stuff, it had just bored me rigid.  I decided I needed to learn it properly.  I bought and read 'Teach Yourself Grammar' - whatever happened to those 'Teach Yourself' books, they were marvellous - then I read it again and then I wrote it out long hand.

I learnt grammar.  Incidentally, don't bother doing this yourself.  Once I had acquired the knowledge I realised that I had completely overestimated just how useful the role of grammar is in writing.

But repeats are valuable for more than just learning.  Wallpapers are more appealing for having repeating patterns on them.  Would you really want every wall to have an original creation on it?  Pop songs often sound better when you have heard them a hundred times before.  Rereading a book or a poem can be a lot more rewarding than the first one.

So if Steve, or anyone else come to that, would rather go over old ground than break new, then why not.  It is much better than coming up with something new for the sake of it.

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