I read a book recently that I’d been waiting for for a while. It was not as good as I’d hoped, but it wasn’t bad either. It was really mostly fan service. 

But what kept drawing me out of the story was the construction, “blank blanking the blank, blank blanked.” 

While watching the road for debris and wildlife, Phil drove his car. 

That’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but that construction occurred at least once every five pages (where “page” equals “one screen of text on my phone”). As I’ve said in the past, you don’t want to do something in your writing that draws attention to itself. There is a way to do repetition so that it’s not obvious, and the first step is not repeating the same thing as often — whether it’s a word, series of words, or sentence construction. Of course, the standard constructions are exempt — “adjective noun verb direct object” — in the same way that “said” is exempt from repetition in dialogue tags.

There are certain things I do in my writing that can be a little repetitive, but I don’t do them so often that readers notice (I hope). If you notice, and if it draws you out of the story, then I’m doing something wrong.