Repetition in writing - isn't that a bad thing?

Repeating yourself is not always a good thing! 

In fact, students can improve their writing by learning not to over-use the same word in a paragraph, substituting repetitions with a wider vocabulary instead.

But when it’s done skilfully, repetition can be very powerful.

This current series of posts is about learning from that great master of writing, Charles Dickens.  The last post focused on using metaphors and similes, and you can read that here.

Towards the end of the extract from Dickens’ novel Hard Times I have been focusing on (you can read it in the first post of the series here), he uses repetition very powerfully:

"It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next."

He’s not just repeating because he doesn’t know any other words! 

He’s deliberately repeating the phrase “the same” to show how monotonous and soul-destroying life is for people who live in Coketown.

How could you use repetition deliberately to improve your writing?

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