Two types of overused words trickle into my books with the regularity of my brother's toilet run. The first, fashion words. Say, the punchy sound of "crisp" takes my fancy, and before I know it, it pops up in nearly every chapter. The crisp white of a tablecloth. The crisp smell of the cold on clothes. The attentive reader will spot each occurrence. Not ideal.
Good news is, this type of overused word tends to be picked up during ordinary revision. Phew.
The second type is a lot sneakier. This group contains the blah words we use in abundance every day, the perfectly adequate, but not terribly exciting bunch that fills our books. In many cases, these words cause no major concern. If every sentence were to sparkle and glitter with bling words, the reader might be too dazzled to follow the plot. On the other hand, too many pedestrian expressions run the risk of sending your readership asnooze.
You should handle these specimens on a case-by-case basis, but first, you need to identify them.
Here a list of my overused words.
Pull
Push
Look
See
Feel
(My/her...) Own
Myself, herself...
Hear
Sound
Smell
Bitter
Very
Really
Actually
Large
Small
A little
A lot
Thought
Knew
Reach
Bring
Start
That
About
All
So
Just
There are many more, but we want to keep revision within bounds, don't we? One final note on the most common offender, not included above. The personal pronoun. In the first person POV, this would be 'I,' in third person 'he/she.' How can you avoid personal pronouns, you ask. Well, that will be the subject of a future post, so be sure to check back in soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment