One of my jobs recently had a paragraph with three sentences: the first used “surge’, the second used “urge” and the third used “surge” again. We’d used “surge” already in a previous paragraph and were to use it subsequently so I changed the above to “spike”, “encourage” and “sharp rise”. Sometimes, repetition of a word can give emphasis and offers a certain poetry. However, in this case, it just appeared that the writer lacked the vocabulary to describe the situation.
You don’t need to be a walking thesaurus to be a good proofreader but having a good vocabulary means you can add value to your client’s work.
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How pleasant it would be if some of our news organisations heeded this advice, allowing us to hear a little about streets, houses and towns being “submerged” or “flooded” or even “filled with water” instead of them all of being “inundated” as they are at the moment.