Here, here! Repeat After Abraham Lincoln…

The main Common App essay has a word limit of 650. Students often wonder two things: should they max the essay’s word limit, and should they use ornate SAT words in place of simple ones? When this question comes up, I point them to one of America's most iconic speeches.

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was eight sentences and two minutes long. Two hundred sixty-eight words. Among them, the word “here” appears eight times. It is a brisk insistence that is never the same. Each “here” arrives surely but differently as an unrepeatable gesture. It crops up at sentence beginnings, mid-clause, and parenthetically. It disorients and unites.

Here is a place. Here is an invocation of sacrifice. Here we stand to decide dedication and devotion. Here is a tether to those who died. Here gathers anticipation, a rhythm both deliberate and deranged. The speech teaches brevity as moral currency. It demands that each word carry its weight. It teaches that repetition without inventiveness becomes dull, but that a repeated word, recast, relocated, can electrify the ear.

I often find modern writing afraid of its own echo. It doesn’t want to repeat a word if an elegant variation of it will suffice. Lincoln doesn’t shy away, though. We who fall back into paragraphs lose sight of the power in purposeful repetition. The Gettysburg Address reminds us: be brief. Be fearless. And when a word matters, say it again—in a new place, with new direction, as Lincoln did, well, here. It is a lesson in the conviction that a word’s power is not in its inscrutability but its capacity to hold so much meaning and emotion in just a single four-letter syllable like “here.”