---
title: "Anaphora: Repeating the Opening of Successive Clauses"
url: https://www.learningloftinstitute.com/glossary/anaphora
source: Learning Loft Institute
language: en
updated: 2026-08-21
section: "Glossary › Anaphora: Repeating the Opening of Successive Clauses"
---
# Anaphora: Repeating the Opening of Successive Clauses
> **Answer.** Anaphora is the repetition of the same word or words at the start of successive clauses, sentences or lines. Holding the opening fixed makes the changing part of each clause land harder, builds a rhythm across the passage, and reads as conviction rather than as accidental repetition.
## Key facts
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| --- | --- |
| Definition | Anaphora is the deliberate repetition of the same opening words in a run of successive clauses, sentences or lines of verse. |
| Where students meet it | Grade 8 English, in the first work on rhetoric and speech writing, and again in GCSE English Language non-fiction reading and spoken language tasks. |
## Why holding the opening still makes the rest louder
Repetition normally weakens writing. Anaphora is the case where it does not, because the repeated part stops being information and becomes a frame. Once the listener knows the phrase is coming, attention shifts entirely to whatever follows it.
It also does something to pace. Each repetition restarts the sentence at the same pitch, so a passage builds instead of tailing off, and an audience can hear where the next clause begins before the speaker reaches it. That is why anaphora belongs to speeches far more than to prose.
## Two passages, and what each repetition is doing
Martin Luther King's address at the March on Washington in August 1963 returns to I have a dream that one day across a series of images of the future. The fixed opening turns separate hopes into one continuous vision, and it makes the speech quotable — a listener remembers the phrase and hangs the rest on it.
Dickens opens A Tale of Two Cities with it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and keeps going through a long series of paired opposites. Here the repetition does the opposite of building: because the opening never changes while the endings contradict each other, the age itself starts to sound impossible to describe.
When a question asks for the effect, these are the things a marker is waiting to see named:
- Builds rhythm and momentum across a passage rather than within one sentence
- Moves the listener's attention onto the part that changes
- Signals conviction — a speaker who repeats does not sound as though they are hedging
- Binds separate points into one argument instead of a list
- Makes the phrase memorable, and quotable afterwards
## The word has a second, unrelated meaning
In linguistics, anaphora means something else entirely: a word pointing back to something already mentioned, as she points back to Ayesha. That sense has nothing to do with repetition at the start of clauses, and it is the sense you meet in grammar rather than in literature.
Two related rhetorical terms are worth keeping straight. Epistrophe repeats at the end of clauses instead of the start — of the people, by the people, for the people. Epanalepsis, less commonly taught, opens and closes the same clause with the same word.
## Questions
### What is the difference between anaphora and repetition?
Anaphora is a specific kind of repetition: the same words, at the start of clauses, in a run. Using a word several times in a paragraph is repetition and is often accidental. Naming anaphora commits you to showing the pattern, because the position and the run are the whole point of the term.
### What is the difference between anaphora and epistrophe?
Position. Anaphora repeats at the beginning of successive clauses; epistrophe repeats at the end. Lincoln's of the people, by the people, for the people is epistrophe. The effects differ too: anaphora builds forward momentum, while epistrophe lands each clause on the same note, like a refrain.
### Do I need to use the word anaphora in a GCSE answer?
Only if you are certain of it. Mark schemes credit accurate subject terminology, but they credit explanation of effect far more, and a wrong term costs more than a plain description gains. The writer repeats we shall fight at the start of each clause is safe, accurate and fully analysable.
### Is anaphora only for speeches?
It is most at home there, because it is built for the ear, but it appears in poetry, in prose openings such as Dickens's, in advertising and in political writing. What it needs is a passage the reader takes in as one unit. Spread too thin, the pattern stops being audible and stops working.
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