Repetition

“ All our acts are reducible to one of two kinds: either they are acts of creation, effecting a new result, or they are acts of repetition. Acts of repetition tend rapidly to become habits; and they may be performed without attention or positive volition. Thus, as I am dressing in the morning I may be planning the work for the day; while my mind is given over to thought, I lose the sense of my material surroundings, my muscles work automatically, the motor-currents flowing through the well-worn grooves, and by force of habit the acts execute themselves. ”

“ Offensive Repetition
Careless repetition attracts attention to words that do not need emphasis. It is extremely annoying to the reader.
48a. Unless a word or phrase is repeated deliberately to gain force or clearness, its repetition is a blunder. Get rid of recurring expressions in one of three ways: (1) by substituting equivalent expressions, (2) by using pronouns more liberally, (3) by rearranging the sentence so as to say once what has awkwardly been said twice. ”

“ Here we have an exhibition of what repetition can do, when persisted in daily and hourly over a considerable stretch of time, where one is merely reading for entertainment, without thought or intention of preserving in the memory that which is read. ”

“ An excellent example that repetition of sensations is a source of agreeable effects is furnished by the copy-book of every schoolboy, which is usually a treasure-house of such things, and only in need of an Abbé Domenech to become celebrated. Any figure, no matter how crude or poor, if several times repeated, with the repetitions placed in line, will produce a tolerable frieze. ”

“ If the persistence of youth be in you and the belief that a jest becomes better with repetition—like beans nine days cold within the pot—you will shout your question until he turns the corner and his answer is lost in the noises of the street. ”

“ While it is admitted that the word habit has been used in a somewhat broader sense than is usual, we must protest against the tendency in [pg 042] psychological literature to limit its meaning to repetition. This usage is much less in accord with popular usage than is the wider way in which we have used the word. It assumes from the start the identity of habit with routine. Repetition is in no sense the essence of habit. Tendency to repeat acts is an incident of many habits but not of all. ”

“ To mark precisely the moment when the pupil understands what is said, the moment when he is master of the necessary ideas, and, consequently, the moment when repetition should cease, is, perhaps, the most difficult thing in the art of teaching. ”

“ He reduces ornamental design to five principles, Repetition, Alternation, Symmetry, Progression, and Confusion.
Fig. 5.
Wave Pattern.
First, Repetition. “You may act on the mind, through sight, by the same means as those that will excite physical sensations. A single prick of a pin is nothing, but a hundred such will be intolerably painful. Repetition produces pleasurable sensations, as well as painful ones.” An insignificant form can become interesting by repetition, and by the suggestion which, singly, it could not originate. ”

“ We must think together the things we wish to have associated. Repetition is the key to the situation, repetition which is the significant thing in habit-formation, repetition which is the only way of coupling two things which we wish to have associated together.
Of course, there is no absolute coupling of two ideas. One sometimes forgets his own name. When we are tired or ill, things which were the most closely associated may not hang together. But those ideas hold together in the firmest way that have been experienced together most often in a state of attention. ”

“ Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit? ”

“ The trick of wisdom of that sort is as quickly acquired as it is easy to practise. Its repetition, when once it is familiar, becomes as boring as the repetition of any bit of sleight-of-hand once we see through it. ”

“ A repetition of the selections to be learned, with full expression by voice and action, repetition again, and again, and again, until the sentiment of them becomes a living reality to the speaker, is the only way to acquire the ability to indicate to others the true proportions, the relative values, and the distinctive character, of what is to be said. ”

“ All expert and technical education is built upon the theory that these trunk-lines of habit become more and more sensitive to their accustomed stimuli, and respond more and more readily.
We are apt to overlook the physical basis of habit. Every repetition of an act makes us more likely to perform that act, and discovers in our wonderful mechanism a tendency to perpetual repetition, whose facility increases in exact proportion to the repetition. ”

“ We can more or less guess how an occurrence produces a change in the brain, and how its repetition gradually produces something analogous to the channel of a river, along which currents flow more easily than in neighbouring paths. We can perceive that in this way, if we had more knowledge, the tendency to habit through repetition might be replaced by a precise account of the effect of each occurrence in bringing about a modification of the sort from which habit would ultimately result. ”

“ But there are some writers who, from the fact that all good repetition is intentional, rashly infer that all intentional repetition is good; and others who may be suspected of making repetitions from negligence, and retaining them from a misty idea that to be aware of a thing is to have intended it. Even when the repetition is a part of the writer's original plan, consideration is necessary before it can be allowed to pass: it is implied in the terms 'rhetorical' or significant repetition that the words repeated would ordinarily be either varied or left out ”

“ This fear of tediousness is not really justified at all, for mechanical work is not necessarily monotonous. Automatism, it is true, is acquired by repetition, but this repetition need not be of the parrot-like type. Repetition, in the sense ascribed to it by the psychologist, simply means having many separate occasions to hear, to see, to utter, or to write a given word or sentence. The object of most of the language-teaching exercises, drills, and devices invented or developed in recent years [102] is precisely to ensure proper repetition in attractive and interesting ways. ”

“ It is best that we write new books without wearying to read the millions of others. I grant that most books are only repetitions of earlier ones. But it is unconscious repetition, and it is exactly that which gives it a wonderfully new meaning. ”

“ Especially in the case of foreign children, in a tale of repetition, such as The Cat and the Mouse, Teeny Tiny, or The Old Woman and Her Pig, will the repetitive passages be an aid to verbal expression. ”

“ The first experience passes through the mind again and again as memory, and thereby becomes strengthened. The fact that repetition of connections establishes these connections is, of course, the justification of drill and review in school studies. The practical needs of life demand that certain ideas be associated so that one calls up the other. Teachers and parents, knowing these desirable connections, endeavor to fix them in the minds of children by repetition. The important facts of history, literature, civics, and science we endeavor, by means of repetition, to fasten in the child’s mind. ”

“ Here, where compression and insertions are to modify the material of instruction, we need to inquire into the forms of connection peculiar to the objects, together with those essential for use, and to determine accordingly the series and web of ideas to be formed in the mind of the pupil. For such organization of ideas, repetition is, at all events, far better [122] adapted than presentation, which can traverse only one of several series at a time, and which passes into repetition the moment an effort is made to bring the other series forward also. ”

“ This brings us to the study of exposition, as it is generally understood, in which all the resources of language are called into service to explain a term or a proposition.
How do Men explain? First, by Repetition. What, then, are the methods of explaining a proposition? First, a proposition may be explained by the repetition of the thought in some other form. To be effective, repetition must add something to what has been said; the words used may be more specific or they may be more general. For example, “A strong partisan may not be a good citizen. ”

“ The mere statement made above, that repetition is necessary in impression, is not sufficient. It is important to know how to distribute the repetitions. Suppose you are memorizing "Psalm of Life" to be recited a month from to-day, and that you require thirty repetitions of the poem to learn it. Shall you make these thirty repetitions at one sitting? Or shall you distribute them among several sittings? In general, it is better to spread the repetitions over a period of time. The question then arises, what is the most effective distribution? ”

“ Either in himself, or in his descendants continuing to live under these conditions, enforced repetition must eventually bring about a state in which this mode of directing the energies will be no more repugnant than the various other modes previously natural to the race. ”

“ The same statement can never be repeated even in the same form of words, and it is not the old question that is propounded at the third time of asking. Repetition, that is to say, is the strongest generator of emphasis known to language. ”

“ Moreover, every repetition further breaks down the present resistance and, therefore, in a sense further enslaves the individual to that mode of action. The word poorly articulated for the first time, the letter incorrectly formed, the impatient shrug of the shoulder—these set up their various tracks, create a tendency, and soon, through the establishment of lower connections, become unconscious habits. Thus it is that every one soon becomes a bundle of habits. ”

“ In poetry, the rhymes, the cadence, the alliteration, the peculiar structure of the poet's lines, aids us. All these are mechanical helps to the memory. Repetition seems much more agreeable to some people than to others; but it may be doubted whether a facility and propensity to repetition be favourable to rational memory. ”

“ Repetition must cease to be pure repetition and become cumulative before it can give rise to the consciousness of repetition. The first condition of counting, then, is that the sensorium should retain something of the first impression while it receives the second, or (to state the corresponding mental fact) that the second sensation should be felt together with a survival of the first from which it is distinguished in point of existence and with which it is identified in point of character. ”

“ There are also various other reasons why repetition and apparent tautology are frequently beauties of the highest kind. Among the chief of these reasons is the interest which the mind attaches to words, not only as symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion. And further, from a spirit of fondness, exultation, and gratitude, the mind luxuriates in the repetition of words which appear successfully to communicate its feelings. ”

“ If such miserable sophisms were to prevail, there would never be a good house or a good government in the world.” (“Essay on Milton,” by Lord Macaulay.)
Repetition. A third method of developing a paragraph from a topic-sentence is by repetition. Simply to repeat in other words would be useless redundancy; but so to repeat that with each repetition the thought broadens or deepens is valuable in proposing a subject or explaining it. No person has attained greater skill in repetition than Matthew Arnold, and much of his clearness comes from his repetition, often of the very same phrases. ”

“ The progress of physiological psychology, of the investigation of the workings of the mind, has taught us, in unmistakable accents, the strong tendency which exists for a habit to be formed by repetition of anything. After a thing has been done several times it becomes exceedingly easy to do it again. ”

“ Now in this definition there is to start with absolutely nothing but the formal aim to bring about the bare repetition a second time by man, so far as his means will permit of this, of all that was already in the external world, precisely too in the way it is there. ”

“ The human animal sees through the trick, he comprehends it and does not need the endless repetition. When repetition has worn a path in our minds, then we, too, act automatically, or without [Pg 221] conscious thought, as we do, for instance, in forming the letters when we write. ”

“ In the units lies the meaning of the repetition, in the regular alternates the possibility of its expression.
(4) The rhythmic character of repetition is not felt by a certain type of subject, when it goes smoothly. When a variation is made which would destroy any possible rhythm, its lack is felt, and its violation finds expression only in rhythmic terms.
(5) More violation is done to a series to have the size of units varied than the filling. (This corroborates previous experiments.) ”

“ Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve, and in those Mediterranean regions that nurtured the classic mind, by continually repeating the same definite scenes, nature forced it to fix its ideas. ”