Heavy usage of synonyms in English or not?

I am a native German speaker and in German it is considered very bad style to use a word more than once in a sentence or even in close proximity. So you usually have a big list of synonyms in your head and you always cycle though these words while writing or even change complete sentences so you will not have to use the same words.

I always automatically assumed that this is also the case in English. Now someone told me that this is actually nothing you have to be concerned about. (This sentence is actually a good example for this. I could have written: "Now someone told me that this is actually not the case in English." but I already used "the case in English" in the sentence before that and such repetitions are considered to be extremely clumsy writing in German.)

Could someone please comment on this?

Solution 1:

I consider it a matter of good style in English to vary all aspects of composition to keep the presentation of the material fresh and interesting. That means varying sentence length, mixing active and passive voice — in short, avoiding repetition and, with it, monotony. Obviously that applies to word choice as well. I am constantly on the hunt for synonyms. Mostly those come naturally, because I have a sizable vocabulary and English affords a writer so many ways to express the same idea. But at times it does become difficult to find suitable alternates. Even then I consider it well worth my time and effort to do so.

The only exception I make is when I want to use repetition to add rhetorical emphasis: to make a point, to make a meaning clear, to make the reader stop and pay close attention.

I would say that what has served you in German will serve you in English. And I already see evidence in your writing of the traits I describe above, which I perceive as virtues. Whoever has advised you otherwise is not doing you any favors. That is, unless that person is someone who will be reviewing your dissertation and has an obsessive fondness for needless repetition.

Solution 2:

I think it depends on the style of writing:

I agree that for most non-technical writing it's often considered poor style to repeat a word in the same sentence (other than articles, conjunctions & prepositions such as 'the', 'a', 'and', 'in', 'to', 'of' ...).

In technical and scientific writing, on the other hand, words often have precise technical meanings and it can be confusing or even misleading to use different words to convey precisely the same meaning. Confusing as the reader may be left puzzling over whether the different words are intended to convey slightly different meanings, and misleading if the reader understands them to have slightly different meanings when the author intended the same meaning. So in scientific and technical writing such as journal articles and instruction manuals, I'd highly recommend using the same word to convey the same meaning, even if it means repeating it within a sentence.