An editing tip

I’ve been doing some editing for someone else and I’m reminded yet again of one of the rookie mistakes writers make.

When you’re reading through to find all the repetitions in your text – coz I know y’all do that like good writers – make sure you go to your friend the thesaurus for a few different alternatives.

If a repetition occurs over and over (as repetitions are wont to do), then you don’t want to be replacing the repetition with only one new word … otherwise, you’ve killed one repeated instance, but then created another whole series of them through careless machine-like replacement.