It’s easy to notice overused words
and phrases in other people’s writing, but do you notice them in your own? Yes,
I have to admit I read Fifty Shades of
Grey, if only to try and understand what all the fuss was about. It’s one
of the worst novels I’d read for many reasons, but particularly those
irritating repeated phrases. Oh my!
So how, as writers, do we get rid
of them? Firstly, re-read your work until you’re sick of the sight of it. It
can help to look at your writing in a different way. Print it out if you
normally proofread onscreen. Or put it in a different font.
Secondly, have other people point
them out. Ask all your beta readers to look out for them. During the
publication of Future Perfect, the
editor pointed out that my characters were biting their lips on five separate
occasions. I’ve now added that expression to the list in my writing book,
together with ‘and so’, ‘right,’ ‘sighed’, ‘smiled,’ ‘obviously’ and ‘certainly’.
This is where the ‘find’ feature in Word comes into its own. It’s also useful
for pruning out all those pesky adverbs: put in ‘ly’ and see how many you’ve
used.
Another useful device is the word
cloud. By pasting a block of text, this website generates a word cloud that
shows you which words feature most often in the text.
But it’s not only words and
phrases. A friend recently pointed out to me that I use a lot of ellipses –
she’d been ticked off by her editor for the same thing. Annoyingly, the ‘find’
feature didn’t allow me to search for … but a quick search through my
manuscript revealed the awful truth. I use this far too often to indicate
pauses in speech and the habit’s getting worse!
So what are your writing tics?
