Why Repeating Yourself Is a Good Thing

It’s better to overcommunicate and sound redundant than to undercommunicate and seem unclear and uncaring.

 
In the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was preparing his speech for the March on Washington. When he asked his advisors for feedback on a direction he was considering, they shot it down. “It’s trite, it’s cliché,” Wyatt Walker said. “You’ve used it too many times already.”

King took their advice and scrapped his idea.

Many people have an allergic reaction to repetition. When politicians repeat their stump speeches on the campaign trail, we judge them as inauthentic. When colleagues repeat their ideas in meetings, we tune them out. When our spouses repeat their favorite stories, we doze off.

But it turns out that repeating yourself is vital to effective communication. Psychologists have long demonstrated that with repeated exposure to ideas, we start to like them more. As the saying goes, the greatest barrier to communication is the illusion that it occurred. Reinforcing a message makes it more familiar and more memorable.

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