After many years of working with students on their academic writing, I decided to finally dig a little deeper into something of a recurring theme: the common reluctance among them to repeatwords and phrases, and the reader’s resulting confusion. Drawing on theories of lexical cohesionfirst outlined in Halliday and Hasan (1976), this paper will explore the role of repetition in writing. It will also present an analysis of data collected from students at the University of Manchester to examine the nature and origin of students’ attitudes to repetition and related issues. The theory and data analysis will form the basis of a consideration of how we might help students achieve abetter understanding of this important aspect of academic writing.

Halliday, M. and R. Hasan (1976) Cohesion in English. London: Longman.