From Margie Lawson:
In January, I’m teaching Advanced Craft, for journeymen writers who have mastered the basics, but want to take their writing to the next level. We cover everything from big things, like beginnings and backstory, to small things like adverbs, writing tight, and the subject of this blog: overused words.
We all have them. Mine may be different than yours, but they’re like whack-a-moles—you banish one, and two others pop up.
You may think they don’t matter but they do. They irritate the reader on a subconscious level. Use them enough, and readers will remember they have to put the laundry in the dryer—and probably won’t return to the book for days or (gasp) forever. The reader couldn’t tell you why, just that the book didn’t engage them.
These are ones I see all the time in published books as well as manuscripts.
Up/down/back
I stood up. If you go from sitting to standing, we know it’s up.
I sat back down. As above, with the added unneeded word ‘back.’ You most likely said earlier that the character stood.
I turned back to her. Turning is back. I’ll bet if you look at the description, we’d know without the extra word.
Was
It was less than five minutes later when…. It’s not only telling, it’s passive structure, and very distant POV. Think about it. Do you ever think this phrase? And it’s so easy to get rid of! Do a find in Word. You’ll be shocked how many you have. Analyze the sentence. I guarantee you can do better with very little thought.
Link to the rest at Margie Lawson
I’m all for good grammar, but people who dive off into the weeds like this have stopped thinking about WHAT they are writing. This brings to mind all the book book blurbs that gush over wonderful prose, ignoring that the book is boring and pointless.
1) Auto-checking programs are best at one thing, in my opinion: spotting repeated words. When you wrack your brain to come up with just the right term, you often find yourself using it again (and again) just a few sentences later, since it seems to now be in the front of your mind. (Not to mention the typical “the the” sort of stutter, esp. when it crosses a line break.) Automated checkers are better at finding that than human eyes and brains for sound psychological reasons.
2) This article’s specific advice is wrong for all the reasons the above commenters have noted. It’s also wrong for a more general reason: it interferes with the author’s (or character’s) voice. There are deviations from standard grammar that are just errors, esp. when they throw the reader out of the story. But there are many deviations from formal written English grammar that are just regional, register, customary, humorous, rhetorical, or dialectical flavors. Use them to convey meaning and context and background. Ultimately, it’s ALL speech, whether it’s in quotes or not. Sometimes it’s the author’s speech, and sometimes it’s someone else’s. (Even dry non-fictional dissertations are, after all, speech.)
You and I think alike.
I have a lifetime membership to Autocrit – and mostly use it for its counting functions.
My brain is damaged – so I tend to repeat words as I write, the brain searching for and delivering the nearest word that will convey the required meaning.
That doesn’t mean I want the repeats there, so the last step, after finishing story telling and listening, for flow, is an hour spent with the sections in AC that makes lists. Now, separate from writing, I ask myself if ‘good’ needs to be present six times in this scene. Is it a marker for a particular character? Is it something that needs to have synonyms carefully examined? Should I rewrite those sentences?
If I worried about it at the writing stage, I’d never get a word out.
I was really surprised at how many repetitions I tend to use when I first started this kind of editing. Now I’m surprised that I still do it so much – when I’m very aware of the fault. But I shrug and correct.
I also object to removing the “back” from “I turned back to her.”
I might accept removing “back” if it’s firmly established that your back was facing her to begin with. But even so, the removal introduces an ambiguity. After all, she — let’s call her “Mandy” — might have come up beside you, and then you turned to her. Not “back,” but just “turned” because she’s right next to you. But if you keep the “back,” the reader will know Mandy has remained in her starting position; at least half the readers will otherwise think she moved unless you specify “turned back.” I go for precision if it helps avoid the appearance of continuity errors.
Now, a few beta readers, and software grammar checkers, have dinged me for using “had” when I’m writing in the past perfect. For some reason they think “had” is a filler word. The past perfect is what “had” is for, people! “Had” is doing its job if I write, “Mandy had gone for a drive when she heard the news.”
In the past, Mandy did a thing, then she did another thing. Both actions occurred in the past, but one past action happened before the other past action. So we use “had,” which gives us clarity as to which past event happened first. You’re welcome.
The checkers also blindly object to “had” even when used as a possessive: “he had two French hens, and a partridge in a pear tree.”
I don’t see how that sentence makes sense without the “had,” and if had is unnecessary, then the sentence must make sense without it. Notice how I said “if … then”? Yes, grammar checkers also claim “then” is a filler word, without regard for their use in “if-then” constructions. Perhaps they can be reprogrammed to check for a preceding “if” in any sentence in which “then” appears. Probably too much to hope they can learn to recognize “then” in a sequential telling, though: “Mandy robbed the bank, then she went to the store.” Oh, maybe the software can be programmed to check for a verb preceding the “then”?
“That” is not a filler word if I’m writing a restrictive clause: “This is the house that Jack built, not that red one over there.”
My judgment about whether a word is filler is determined by whether or not the word has specific job to do, and is doing it. Otherwise, does removing a word add ambiguity? If yes, then keep the word. I’ll believe I’m using a filler word, if the person / machine claiming it’s filler can prove they know the offending word’s purpose to start with. For now I just cheerfully ignore such claims. A day may come when that habit comes back to bite me, but it is not this day 🙂
But, I do like the idea of a proscribed list for words I might personally overuse. I’m reminded of the Spin City episode where the mayor’s press secretary kept saying “optimistic” and “hopeful,” and at one point he smashed them together as “hope-timistic.” Then the other characters introduced him to a thesaurus, and he eagerly learned new options.
This reminds me of a headline I once saw in National Enquirer.
“Seven-Day Miracle UFO Diet”
When I was in college long long ago, a number of my friends and I had what we called “proscribed lists.” One of my friends was George Reedy’s son. His dad was Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary for a while. I think the idea came from him, but maybe not. Our “proscribed lists” contained words which we would not use. If you found yourself over using a word, you put it on your proscribed list. When the bad habit was broken, you removed it.
I kept up the practice long after college. I remember at one time my list was “very, really, actually, basically, correlate, functional.” For a while, I was big on StarOffice (now LibreOffice), even occasionally contributing a line or two of code. I discovered a neat hack in Star Office: I could delete the words on my proscribed list from its spellcheck dictionary. That way, every time I used a proscribed word, it was flagged as a misspelling, reminding me to reconsider the choice.
Later, for various business reasons, I began using Msft Word for all my writing and I never bothered to figure out how to hack the Msft spellcheck dictionary– they make it easy to add words, but removing them is not documented that I know of. I think they implement their spelling dictionary as a sort of trie for speed, like hackers’ password rainbow tables, so removing a word is probably tricky.
At one time, I was acquainted with one of the Word development managers and I suggested adding a proscribed list feature. He liked the idea, but the next time I talked to him he had moved on to another product. Such is software. Who knows? Maybe there is a word processor out there with proscribed lists.
I’m reminded of the value of proscribed lists every time I see unfortunate headlines in which the letter “L” is removed from the word “public.” That list is a brilliant idea.
This advice is simply wrong. Do not trust advice on grammar from someone who doesn’t know any.
I stood contains a verb in the imperfective aspect. It indicates that I was standing at the point in time referred to, not that I began to stand or finished standing at that time.
I stood up contains a verbal phrase in the punctual aspect. It indicates that I performed the act of standing at that particular moment; that I had not been standing before, and was standing thereafter.
The two meanings are different, and each one needs to be expressed clearly and unambiguously, so that nobody mistakes one for the other. And there is no more economical way to do that in English than to add the two-letter adverb ‘up’.
I turned back to her is likewise not the same as I turned to her. It matters whether an action is repeated or only occurring for the first time. In a given case, the adverbial reminder may be unnecessary, but it is a foolish writer who counts on it. Readers’ memories are not infallible, and markers for clarity will seldom be objectionable to any but the terminally pernickety.
Several of Ms. Lawson’s other recommendations fail for the same reason. She doesn’t understand the mechanics of the English language well enough to prescribe usage for anyone else.
Quite right. Hopelessly illiterate.