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Repetition—saying a specific word, phrase, or statement more than once—helps you grab your audience’s attention and leave listeners with enduring memories of your speech:

At the end of the battle, every soldier was killed. Every soldier.

This use of repetition draws listeners’ attention to the fact that all the soldiers on both sides of the conflict died at the end of the battle, driving home a sobering point that the speaker wants to make.

To get the most from repetition, use it sparingly. If you repeat too many statements in your speech, your listeners won’t be able to discern the truly important points in your presentation.

You also can use repetition by returning to a point later in a speech to provide a gentle reminder to your audience. In the following example, a student named Allyson employs this technique in a speech about trekking across Russia:

When most people think about mountains in Russia, they think about the Urals. These are old mountains, stretching some twelve hundred miles from north to south. The mountains themselves are covered with taigas—large forests that blanket the area. . . .

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As I mentioned a few minutes back, these twelve hundred miles of Ural Mountains are an impressive sight, with all sorts of wildlife, including wolves, bears, and many different game birds.

Later in her speech, Allyson again repeats the north-to-south distance (“twelve hundred miles”) to emphasize the challenges of backpacking through the vast Ural mountain range.

Finally, you may want to repeat a point through rewording it— making the point again but in different words. When your original point might be confusing, rewording gives your audience another option for grasping what you mean. Rewording is similar to the technique you use to explain jargon. Here’s one example:

According to the engineering report, the shuttle booster rockets had systems failure with the cooling system, not to mention serious problems with the outer hatch doors and the manually operated crane. Put another way, there were at least three mechanical problems we know of with this last shuttle mission.

Rewording works particularly well in those parts of your speech where you enumerate a list or make a technical statement that might be difficult for your audience to follow.