Are hesitation repetition and deviation bad?

Apart from in “Just a minute”, where the rules forbid it, hesitation, repetition, and deviation can often be used to positive effect.

Hesitators like Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus waited for the right moment to intervene in battle ¹

Speech makers pause to emphasise a point, er um, but quite tricky in writing. Repetition is used by composers to create interesting patterns which apparently have no analogue in speech. Great composers, like Handel blatantly recycle material – but by virtue of their greatness can get away with it. And deviation seems to be central to the meandering convoluted plots of nordic crime writing, which are currently all the rage (unless I am the only that gets utterly lost.)

But repetition can be really really annoying. For example retweeting is top of my list and seems to me to be way too easy to abuse. Repetition of or simply copying & pasting other people’s blog posts is another example, even worse if they are your own.

It is easy to add something to a story, lift the lid on it – crit it, even gush about it, but add something interesting. If you are on facebook, provoke a reaction by posing a question.

We’re so insensed by it that we have raised a petition to get Government to disable copy and paste functions in all computers to encourage original writing. We’ve got schools and Universities to support this, as copying and pasting encourages plagiarism.

Which reminds me, if you haven’t got a lot to say or simply love the concision of TXT – consider Twitter; if you are mainly communicating with your mates but a a few paras short of a full story then Facebook is pretty good. Despite the immediacy of both these channels, they are pretty transient, so bear this in mind.

The advantage of the blog or post on your website, and this is not always fully understood, is that the record of articles is easily searchable/findable, can be edited later and presentation is entirely under your control.