Redundancy vs Repetition

When I was in college I had a American great history professor.

What made him so great were his stories that he added to the discussion of the day.

Quite often we’d lose ourselves in the telling of the story.

What made him even better as a professor, however, was the fact that he wouldn’t tell you just one story. He’d tell you three.

Now, I’m not sure what the power of three is but I do know that I’ve read quite a few times that you have to repeat yourself three times before most people will actually hear you.

Think about that for a second. The first time you say something it goes in one ear and out the other.

The second time they might catch part of what you’re saying but still not really ‘get it‘.

It’s not until the third time that it actually sinks in.

So - what’s my point here?

Well, I’ve been reading quite a few RSS feeds lately and one thing I noticed is that some bloggers give up writing because they’ve said everything they know once already.

They figure if they say something about that topic again that they’ll be redundant.

There is, however, a big difference between being Redundant and Repetitious.

What you want is repetition - that is, you want to make sure that you say what you want to say, say it again, and then say it once more for good measure.

Now, what if you use this, what you need to make sure is that you don’t just copy/paste your last paragraph. Indeed, what you need to do is to restate your key point in a different way. Perhaps it’s another analogy, a different story or something else.

Also, with regards to those bloggers who feel they’ve said it already. Keep in mind that your blog should be getting new readers and those readers are very unlikely to go back and read all of your older content.

So, from time to time, you simply need to restate what you’ve said before in a different fashion. Perhaps you can add something new to it or a different twist on an old subject.

G-Man