Have you ever read blog posts or articles in general which seem to reflect the writer’s lack of vocabulary? What I mean by this is that there is some written work in which the same words are used over and over again, sometimes more than twice in a sentence. Grammatically, there is nothing wrong with using the same words many times over. However, for the sake of readability, I believe that you should avoid repeating words one time too many. Take a look at this example: We went to the grocery store today. While we were at the grocery store, I got irritated because there were too many people at the grocery store. I hate doing my grocery shopping on the weekend because everyone and their mom seem to be at the grocery. That short paragraph is grammatically sound. There is nothing wrong there. However, you probably noticed that the word grocery was overused. How can you make that paragraph better? Here is my reconstruction: We went to the grocery store today and while we were there, I got irritated because there were too many people. I hate going shopping on the weekend because everyone does theirs at the same time. It would be a good practice to use synonyms to certain words. You should also remember that for nouns, you can substitute them with pronouns. This would avoid repetition and make your writing easier to read.
Originally posted on July 20, 2008 @ 8:54 am
