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After giving a general overview of the topic of cosmic strings I will present an analytic model specifically designed to address the issue of small scale structure on cosmic string networks. The model is derived from the microscopic string equations, together with a few motivated assumptions. The resulting form of the correlation between two points on a string will then be exploited to study smoothing by gravitational radiation, loop formation and lensing by cosmic strings. In addition, the properties of the small loop population and the possibility of detecting gravitational waves generated by their lowest harmonics will be discussed.