Ever been told not to repeat yourself in your writing? Or been told that repetition is a complete academic no-no? Well, that’s not entirely true. But before I explain why, I must make a slight digression. Bear with me. It’ll come together in just a minute.

It can be helpful for academic writers to consciously adopt and use very specific writing terms and the concepts they encapsulate. For example the term inner critic describes the little voice that constantly reads and critiques what you are writing. If you know the term inner critic and its meaning you probably also know when and how it’s useful in your own writing processes. Too much inner critic when you are generating a draft can lead to continued rewriting of the same small section of text – it’s a productivity death spiral. Too little inner critic when you are refining that draft can lead to a bloated and choppy text.

And now I get to the repetition. Here’s another writing term that can be as helpful as the inner critic. Drum roll. Productive redundancy. Yes that’s right. Productive redundancy.

Now productive redundancy may sound like an oxymoron since we are regularly told redundancy is A Bad Thing and the key to good academic writing is concision. Your goal in revising your academic writing is to remove all redundant material. Better still. don’t write anything over and over any time. You need rid yourself of anything either unnecessary or repetitive. Or both.

So I’m going to tell you why that might not always be a good idea. Some redundancy is productive.

Writing that is unnecessary

When you are first learning something and are trying to get on top of it  – a methodology, a theory, a set of research results – it is often very helpful to write a lot. And that writing may be pretty repetitive. Have a lot of excess quotes. Labour the point. But that’s OK. That’s because when you are learning about something it is very helpful to use writing as a way to think yourself into the ‘stuff’. The most important thing about this kind of learning writing is that you know you need to rewrite it. You don’t necessarily send it off to your supervisor. And you know that the next time you write about the new stuff, or the time after that, will be the time when you can write succinctly and in largely your own words. That’s productive redundancy – redundancy that gets you somewhere as a writer. ( It’s also called positive redundancy or beneficial redundancy.)

I learnt about the term Productive Redundancy from Williams and Columb. They offer another example of writing that is helpful in a draft but then gets re-written out. The talk about writing that describes your thinking – they see this as another sign of a writer not familiar with their material. They put it like this:

When we are comfortable thinking through familiar problems, we don’t have to narrate how we do it. But when we are inexperienced, we often feel compelled to tell  story about what we though or did. 

What they mean is writing that goes like this… It is my view that.. it is my opinion that… I believe etc.. Starting sentences or paragraphs is, they say, a narrative of thinking. They suggest that the writer just needs to remove themselves from the text –after all, if they are writing the statement then it is their opinion, view, belief etc. Get rid of the ‘I’ opening gambit, they advise, and just use what’s left.

However, there are times when you do want to write about yourself, and to put yourself and your thoughts and feelings into the text. So it is clearly important when revising to ask yourself whether you do need or want to be in the text or can safely be removed.

You can also benefit from apparently unnecessary writing when you are drafting a large text. Over-signposting can be very helpful. Keeping track of where you are going in a big and complex text can be tricky. So you start each big chunk or chapter with an outline, and then say it again when you write what each section will do. At the end of the chunk/chapter you make a summary. And then you start the next chunk/chapter with a summary of where you’ve just been and where you’re going now. This kind of early over-signposting can help you keep track of the moves in your argument and the narrative arc you are creating.

The most important thing about signposting to excess is that you need to remove a lot of it next time round or run the risk of your reader nodding off to sleep. You will need some signposting in your final text but you will also need to keep your reader engaged and interested – too much signposting isn’t a great read. What benefits you as a writer and what is good for readers are not always the same thing.

Repeating yourself

Read the above against this next point. When you are writing a long and/or complex argument you usually do need to keep reminding readers what is important and how your ideas hang together, how they build on each other and add up to something at the end. In a thesis for example you do end up returning to your key concepts and results time and time again. But this kind of repetition doesn’t mean repeating exact phrases. Readers do appreciate you showing them the ways in which your thinking and their interpretations build throughout the text. They just don’t want to read the exact same words. Deja vu.

So when you go back to a term and concept it is never exactly the same as it was before because it is going somewhere, making new connections, referring back to your original question/hypothesis and anticipating where to next. In this kind of productive redundancy, you need to keep finding different ways to explain and express your important points. And when revising you look to make sure the repetition makes the argument logical and concise as well as being coherent and interesting. To put it another way, when you recap you also usually remix.

Sometimes you may want to repeat yourself for stylistic reasons. You deliberately reuse a word, a phrase, a sentence beginning in order to create a particular effect/mood/rhythm. This kind of stylistic move often happens in revising but you may find it first up in your beginning draft.

There are also pedagogical reasons for writing the same thing in different ways. Quite often one explanation doesn’t work for everyone and you often have to try more than one thing. Case in point, I often say the same thing twice in this blog and hope that one version works for you .

So that’s productive redundancy. Of course, as in all matters academic writing, adding a term like productive redundancy to your thinking tools doesn’t mean that you are bound by a rule. As always, deciding when where and how to repeat of signpost is related to what you are writing and for whom. Academic writing is a matter of convention and authoring choices. However, having the term productive redundancy, and the ideas about it, in your drafting and revising repertoire may be helpful.

And if you are interested in exploring the positive and negatives of redundancy in academic writing, start with this scoping review.