Repetition in "My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It" 			Michael Pruess
Twain uses diacope a lot in this piece, and often where other forms of repetition occur they could easily be mistaken for diacope due to their satisfaction of requirements for multiple types of word repetition. We have diacope on page five, with "ages and ages", and on that same page, antistrophe shows itself in "chattel slaveries, and military slaveris, and religious slaveries". This is also diacope, repeating the word "slaveries", and, at the same time, it is also polysyndeton. Diacope appears again in "I do not like the lie of bravado, nor the lie of virtuous ecstasy" on page eight. Twain also uses a lot of conduplication- on page eight, "but it is alive yet; alive", and on page five the same words- "kept them alive; keeps them alive yet, here ... keeping them alive". Conduplication is also very similar to diacope.
The similarities are those not shared by the more strict terms, such as synploce and antistrophe. The majority of Twain's repetition is relatively formless. It seems to me as though his use of diacope and conduplication (though to be honest, I'm not quite sure which is which in his use) is mainly a device of keeping his reader involved. When you read "kept them alive; keeps them alive yet" you want to read to the end of the thought, to the "go on keeping them alive". It has the same effect as the repetition in Lord Chesterfield's piece, and the same affect as the diacope in Susan Sontag's piece. The piece ploughs forward, offering us the readers these few repeated words, thoughts, points of emphasis, and coming back to them often enough to keep us focused and on-track as we attempt to keep up with the writing. It's very engaging, and, due to its formlessness, it can be used almost anywhere. A few words repeated, such as in my examples above, placed in seemingly uncalculated positions in the text, help immensely in making sure that the reader not only glimpses, but reads; and not only reads, but thinks, and hopefully understands.