Why repetition is at the heart of confirmation strategies in conversation design
This post is part of “Words go here,” a series about the role of language design in product design.
New to the gym, I’ve got repetition on the brain lately — as in “reps,” the no-pain-no-gain kind. But being a conversation designer and linguist, I more often find myself thinking about repetition in language than at the lat pulldown machine.
Here’s an example of repetition in a mini-dialog:
A: Joe’s a waiter, but he paints on the side.
B: Oh, what kind of pictures does he paint?
A: Pictures?! He paints houses.
The verb “paint” is repeated twice, and…
