Definition
Echo words are instances where the same word or a close variant appears multiple times in nearby sentences or paragraphs without intentional rhetorical purpose. Unlike deliberate repetition for emphasis (like anaphora), echo words are accidental and draw the reader's attention to the writing itself rather than the story. They're one of the most common issues caught during line editing.
Why It Matters
Your reader might not consciously notice an echo, but they'll feel it. The prose starts to feel clunky, repetitive, or amateurish without them knowing why. Catching echoes is one of the simplest revision skills that immediately polishes your writing and makes it feel more professional.
Common Mistakes
Intentional repetition is a powerful tool. Anaphora, refrains, and callback phrases all repeat on purpose. The problem is accidental repetition where the same word appears twice because you didn't notice, not because you chose it.
Echoes include word families too. 'Dark' and 'darkness' in consecutive sentences, or 'walked' and 'walking' on the same page, create the same clunky effect. Scan for roots, not just identical words.
Swapping 'said' for 'exclaimed' or 'opined' to avoid repetition makes your writing worse, not better. Sometimes the fix is restructuring the sentence so you don't need the word at all, rather than finding a synonym.
Words like 'just,' 'really,' 'very,' 'that,' and 'then' repeat constantly because they're so common you stop seeing them. Do a dedicated search for these high-frequency offenders.
Try It Yourself
Pick a page from your current draft and read it slowly, circling or highlighting any word that appears more than once within three sentences. Count how many you found. Now rewrite the passage, eliminating at least half the echoes by restructuring sentences, cutting unnecessary instances, or finding natural alternatives.
Are repeated words cluttering your prose?
Novelium's writing analytics highlights echo words across your manuscript so you can spot repetition patterns your eyes have learned to skip. Fix the accidental echoes and keep the intentional ones.