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Me and Josh, one year ago, at a wedding!

Have you ever heard the term, “epizeuxis”? I first heard the word reading Mark Forsythe’s book Elements of Eloquence, which, if you’re a word nerd like me, I highly recommend reading.

Epizeuxis is a form of repetition, in which a word or phrase is repeated exactly and immediately. You may recognize, “Tiger, tiger burning bright.” That is epizeuxis. Or “Never, never, never, never, never,” from King Lear. It doesn’t have to be a single word only, however. “The horror, the horror,” from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is also epizeuxis.

Another example, and one of my favorites, is from N.K. Jemison’s book, The Fifth Season. It says:

“But this is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
For the last time.”

If you haven’t heard of epizeuxis, though I imagine you’re familiar enough with the technique, perhaps you’ve heard of diacope. Diacope is another form of repetition; Mark Forsythe calls it a “verbal sandwich,” and the most famous example of it is, “Bond, James Bond.” Or perhaps you’re familiar with this one: “Oh Captain, my Captain.”

Similarly to epizeuxis, diacope can be a repetition of a phrase, not simply a single word. “They told me, Heraclitus, they told me” is also diacope (William Cory).

There are a couple different types of diacope besides this one: the elaborative diacope and the extended diacope. The elaborative diacope includes some kind of adjective or adverb that makes the second repetition changed in some way. If diacope is a sandwich, an elaborative diacope has mayonnaise on one slice of bread.

The most famous example of this is from “America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates: “Sea to shining sea.” The word “shining” changes the second “sea,” just a tiny bit. It’s the mayo.

An extended diacope is simply a longer one with more words in the sandwich. I like to think of it as a towering hamburger with every topping you can imagine—lettuce, tomato, onion, you name it. Take this example: “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo!” or, from our collectively favorite musical, “Alexander Hamilton, my name is Alexander Hamilton.”

And what happens when you add epizeuxis and diacope together?

You get lines like, “Repetition, repetition, sweet, sweet repetition.” Or “Alone, alone, all all alone/ Alone on a wide wide sea,” which is from “The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I’ve been exploring techniques like this more often lately. In my experience, they’re not often discussed in the general writing community. You see a lot of comments like, “Don’t use adverbs!” but not a lot comments like, “I included epizeuxis in my most recent WIP and loved it!”

The main criticism of using tools like this, because of course somebody is adamantly opposed to it, is that it creates “purple prose,” which according to Wikipedia is: “overly ornate prose that may disrupt a narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention to its own extravagant style of writing.” (Oct 2022)

The great thing about this definition is that it’s entirely subjective! Whether or not “overly ornate prose” may or may not “disrupt a narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention” to itself is completely, utterly, one-hundred percent subjective.

I personally find that language in prose that’s too simple and plain draws unnecessary attention to itself (I say in a very snobby way lol) just as much as overly elaborate language can. And sometimes, I like it anyway.

What we like is personal, and it’s nobody else’s right to tell us the kinds of tools and techniques we should or shouldn’t use in our writing.

For me, the most important question is: what are these types of tools good for? Certainly, they create emphasis. Impact.

And there’s the answer. Use them when you want to create emphasis. Impact.

Use them to add weight to a moment.

Epizeuxis and diacope are like neon signs that say, “Dear reader, pay attention to this moment.”

So, if you want the reader to pause for a moment in a scene or on a phrase, just repeat, repeat, repeat—the key is to repeat.