Duplicated Anchor Tags

Hi, I recently made a long WP post broken up into sections using anchor tags (<a name=”…). At first I put each tag around the phrase I wanted the link to point to, which screwed up the text formatting on the entire page.

I then tried putting the tags in empty and preceding the target phrase, which works and has no ill side effects. Still, WP’s html editor (even when I paste a working html document in) seems to make many (dozens) duplicates of each tag in seemingly random places.

The duplicates always appear after the first instance of the anchor tag, so the page works fine, but I would appreciate learning what the cause of this is, and what I might do to reduce the code bloat. Manually removing the duplicates has been futile.

Thanks in advance for your time.