One of my friends pointed me towards a rather strange sentence recently, and after reading it over and over and over again, I eventually caved and went to see its wikipedia page. The sentence, which makes grammatical sense, reads as follows:
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”
Okay, on the count of three, everyone say ‘huh?’. One…two…okay just kidding. But to give you an idea of how it works, check out this WikiWorld comic:
Cool huh? Says a lot about the cyclical nature of bullying amongst cattle-like creatures (yes, cattle can be dangerous). But perhaps more importantly, as a writer it raises a very important point about repetition. Repitition is confusing, amusing and in some cases tedious. So if you’re going to use it, make sure you have a really good reason to do so.
One of the most obvious words that gets overused with repetition is the humble ‘said’, typically used as a dialogue marker. For example:
“Hi,” Warrick said.
“Hi yourself,” Leon said.
“Okay, looks like someone got up on the wrong side of bed today,” Warrick said.
“There’s only one side of my bed to get out on,” Leon said. “The left. The right hand side is up against the wall.”
“Uh, that’s a figure of speech, Leon,” Warrick said.
“Is it?” Leon said. “Should I be wearing a sign saying ‘Note Sarcasm’?”
“If this is about last night, “I’m sorry okay?” Warrick said. “I just get protective about my things.”
“I am not one of your things,” Leon said.
“Okay, that came out wrong,” Warrick said. “I meant about people I care about.”
Note how the constant use of “Leon said,” and “Warrick said,” bog down the dialogue and make it drag, not to mention rather boring. What this has lead to is a lot of people trying to find other things to use as dialogue markers. For example.
“Hi,” Warrick waved.
“Hi yourself,” Leon laughed scornfully, not looking up from his textbook.
“Okay, looks like someone got up on the wrong side of bed today,” Warrick said hesitantly.
“There’s only one side of my bed to get out on,” Leon grumped. “The left. The right hand side is up against the wall.”
“Uh, that’s a figure of speech, Leon,” Warrick said.
“Is it?” Leon scathed. “Should I be wearing a sign saying ‘Note Sarcasm’?”
“If this is about last night, “I’m sorry okay?” Warrick apologised. “I just get protective about my things.”
“I am not one of your things,” Leon snapped.
“Okay, that came out wrong,” Warrick whined. “I meant about people I care about.”
Once again, this is different, and removes *some* of the ubiquitous ‘said’s, but they’re still there, and the actual flow of the piece hasn’t improved. Also some of it just does make sense. While you can wave in greeting, you can ‘wave’ a vocalisation. You can wave and vocalise, but that’s two separate actions. Similarly, it’s a little difficult to laugh and talk at the same time. Try it, and then note how much you sound like a bad horse imitation.
The interesting thing with a conversation between two people is that you don’t really need the ‘who said what’ markers past the initial two. It’s a given that they’re replying one after the other, although in a very long piece, you might want to place reminders every now and again. My editor constantly takes me to task for either too many or too few dialogue markers, but anyway, let’s go back to our sample text and take a scalpel to it.
“Hi,” Warrick said.
“Hi yourself,” Leon said, not looking up from his textbook.
“Okay, looks like someone got up on the wrong side of bed today.”
“There’s only one side of my bed to get out on,” Leon grumped. “The left. The right hand side is up against the wall.”
“Uh, that’s a figure of speech, Leon.”
“Is it?” Leon replied. “Should I be wearing a sign saying ‘Note Sarcasm’?”
“If this is about last night, “I’m sorry okay?” Warrick said, raising his hands in apology. “I just get protective about my things.”
“I am not one of your things,” Leon snapped, his eyes flashing.
Warrick grimaced. “Okay, that came out wrong. I meant about people I care about.”
As you can see, it’s been fairly simple to reduce the number of ‘said’s down to three, although there are a few other issues with the piece–Warrick says ‘okay’ a fair bit, three times in this section alone. At this point I’d be deciding if this is a deliberate characteristic I want Warrick to have, or if it’s worth changing one of them to break up the repetition–the second one could easily be changed to ‘all right’.
Of course, repetition can happen outside of dialogue, in descriptive passages (try describing the colour of everything in the Emerald city for starters) for example. But in any case, there’s an example of repetition and how to deal with it. What do you think? Does it bug you in a text as much as it bugs me? Or are there other crimes of writing that get you going?
