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?
I've got loads. I get rid of one and another pops up. There are the ellipses, and there are the commas, and over-use of the word "rather". And the latest one is far too many exclamation marks. I blame emails and social media.
ReplyDeleteOh yes, someone pulled me up on exclamation marks early in my writing life. I still over-use them in communication but have so few in my novels now that my editor put some in!
DeleteSigh ... rolls eyes, whilst biting my lip and consulting my inner goddess, oh my !!!!
ReplyDeleteGreat blog, Kats. I am uberly (like that, Susan? that was just for you, minus the umlaut as I can't find the function!) aware of my little indiscretions such as overuse of dashes, ellipses and the word 'fuck'. I do try very hard to avoid the adverbs and the word 'was' to the point of rearranging an entire paragraph in order to do away with it. It is a problem when I'm reading a book too, I'll tut when I see it and and try to make the sentence work without it! I'm also cautious of using words like I look, I hear etc and try to find away around this by showing rather than telling. It all adds enormously to word count which is why I will never be published :)
Not sure what my tics are now, as I've tried really hard to keep an eye out for them. It used to be 'turned towards'... my characters should've been spinning!
ReplyDeleteI've just finished reading through an MS for someone else that had countless repeats of 'meanwhile' and 'famous' and 'but going back to...' It makes you realise, when you read it in something that's not your own perfect (ha! I wish) work, how frustrating it is for the reader.
Überly Überly Überly.
ReplyDeleteJust showing off now, as I have a German keyboard.
Love it! Glad it's not just me!
ReplyDeleteüberly - as typed on my UK keyboard! (the dash and explanation mark are thrown in for free.) To get the ü hold down the Alt key and key in 129 on the number keypad :-)
ReplyDeleteTo 'find' an ellipsis in Word, highlight an ellipsis in your text and copy it (Ctrl+c). Now paste that into the Find box (Ctrl+v) and it should work :-) :-)