Even Greener Pastures

I wish I knew a rule, but I don't. I just know that repeating 'with' more than once sounds odd to me. Ex: "I cope with adversity with determination and with prayer and with coffee."
It's probably okay grammatically but I can believe that it's good form. Maybe a teacher { SuKi } can put a finer point on it.

Yeah, repetition is to be avoided for stylistic rather than grammar reasons. There’s a stylist trick I always use to improve sentences like the example Jerry gave, by shortening them.  First you have to be sure you can match the preposition with the noun you are using because you can’t always. To improve Jerry’s sentence you can saying “I cope with adversity though determination, prayer and coffee.” You can cope with a problem through prayer and I’m fairly sure you could say “through coffee.” It sounds slightly off to me or maybe just colloquial Californian or something, but I’m sure you can get away with it since “though” suggests “by means of.”

I told people on italki that English is a language of brevity that dislikes long words and sentences. The strongest sentences are those that pack a lot of meaning in them with few words. Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher, mathematician, sort of a genius in about everything, once wrote an essay “How I write” and he explains just that. When he was about 12, while all the other boys were playing football outside, he was in his grandmother’s study reading every book she had (he’s 12 and reading Nietzsche and all the other boys are playing outside- he was a rare one). He said he used to enjoy a little exercise. He’d take a sentence and play around with it and see if he could condense it into as few words as possible without losing meaning or clarity. Through this he became a brilliant writer.