[ch215]

This is known in the craft as monologophobia. Theodore Bernstein, a NYT journalist, who coined the phrase, described a monologophobe as someone 'who would rather walk naked in front of Saks Fifth Avenue than be caught using the same word more than once in three lines of type'.

The most common example is journalists' aversion to repeating words like 'said' or 'told'. People don't _say_ things any more, they: continue, explain, add, verbalise, enunciate, vocalise, and so on.

[wizofaus]

I think I suffer that...I've edited a few HN comments recently after realising I'd used the same word twice in a sentence. Even the previous sentence's overuse of the first person pronoun is bothering me...

[adhesive_wombat]

I think it's drummed into people at school not to overuse the same word. However, this is, as usual for school, an oversimplification.

Repetition is to be avoided when it is that repetition itself that stands out unattractively. In the previous sentence, "repetition" is repeated deliberately in order to emphasise that the referred-to noun remains the same[1].

If your grammatical gymnastics to avoid a repetition become more annoying than the repetition itself, just leave it. (Again, I could have found a circumlocution here for "repetition", but would it make things better? Would it have the same nuances? Would it rather distract from the actual meaning of the whole sentence?)

Off-topic (and I do hope not too personal; I don't mean to be a grammar bore when we're not here for the grammar): overuse of ellipses is far more aggravating, to me, when parsing a comment than an unintentional reuse of a common word like "I". It stands out most because I have a colleague who does it all the time and it drives me up the wall as I can't tell if there's a implicit conclusion that I should be intuiting(...)

If I have to pick something I overuse, it would be parentheticals (like this).

[1]: If short on space, you could distil "... when it is that repetition itself that stands out ..." to just "... when it stands out ...", but what "it" represents is now implicit, the whole is more neutral and the emphasis is lost.

[bombcar]

Which can be subtly changing the meaning - explain carries more baggage than said, as do some of the others.