How to sweeten your lyric with ‘anadiplosis’

Repetition in songwriting works magic on listeners. All by itself, repetition can make a lyric sound musical before it’s even set to a melody.

The chorus and refrain are the two most common forms of repetition in songwriting, but there are many creative options beyond just those two. In this post we’ll explore a technique of repetition called anadiplosis and show you how to write lyrics with it.

Anadiplosis defined, and its uses

Anadiplosis is easy – the writer just takes the word or phrase at the end of a line and repeats it immediately at the beginning of the next line. Like this:

Words add up to make phrases;
phrases combine to make lines.

See how the end of line one lights the beginning of line two? It’s like chain-smoking. You can also use anadiplosis multiple times in a row, linking many lines together in a chain:

Words add up to make phrases;
phrases combine to make lines;
lines link up to make verses;
verses converge to make songs,
songs stitch together in songbooks…
and a songbook makes a well-sung life.

For best results, read that example out loud. Do you feel how each word or phrase shifts its weight from the tail of one line to the head of the next? Each end becomes a new beginning, tugging us along toward that last climactic line.

For another example of anadiplosis in action, check out the final section of lyric in Tom Waits’s “Don’t Go into the Barn”. That final song section is just a list of places arranged using anadiplosis, but it sounds great! Making a list in a lyric is an easy and effective technique for poets and songwriters.

Try these: Two Exercises for Using Anadiplosis

I challenge you to try these two suggested exercises:

1. Go ahead and take the word or phrase that you just ended a line with and repeat it to begin the next line.
2. Write a verse section in which each line is linked to the next one by anadiplosis. Make it four to eight lines long.

Please feel free to share what you come up with in the comments section below. I’ll be interested to read what you come up with.