Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37749
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37749
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The alternative is to stop listening to people who say silly things like that.

There is, unfortunately, a sub-culture of writers who obsess over the minutia of prose without having any actually stylistic skill. This means that come up with a collection of vacuous rules, and one of the most vacuous of these is a suspicion of any form of repetition. If they can find the same course of three words three times on the same page the are instantly aroused, like a pointer who detects the smell of game.

The only place in which concerns could be legitimate at all is in literature. For the most part they don't apply in literature because they are just simply wrong, the product of people trying to do by simple rules what can only be achieved by mature taste.

In academic and technical writing, your overwhelming obligation is to be clear. The use of "is that" in the sentence, "The other feature that has been neglected is that the expert system would ..." is clear. That is all the virtue that it needs to justify its use.

Trying to come up will alternative is quite likely to make your prose less clear, which is the cardinal sin of academic and technical writing. Familiarity and repetition are important component of clarity. Saying the same thing the same way is an important aid to clarity. Rather than trying to introduce variation here, you should be trying to eliminate it.

Variety may have a role to play in art; consistency is fundamental to commerce, engineering, and academic study.

Original score: 2