Our Favorite Words

Every author has them--those go-to words that they use repeatedly. I recently updated The Inconvenient Widow because one comment said I used the word "feel" too often and that was telling not showing. (It wasn't. For the record, I used "feel" about as often as Jane Austen did in Pride and Prejudice. I did, however, use it THREE TIMES in one paragraph--much to my embarrassment.)

My usual downfalls are "however" (I've already used it once here), "really"(yes, I know, I use that below),  "actually" (come on--I've only used all these once...in this extremely short post), etc.

I have referenced this teacher's post before, and since she is actually a good English teacher, she has a great idea in her post that is similar to what I do. She tells her class to circle every time they use the word "then" (not one of my favorite words, thankfully) and cut out all but one of them. Now, she is talking to high schoolers, I'm sure, and is probably lucky to get more than 500 words of writing for any assignment. In an 80,000 word novel, you probably will not be able to cut out all but one of your favorite word. 

What I do when editing, is I use the "find" feature and type in my favorite words one at a time. I then evaluate whether I really need the word in each case. Most of the time, I don't. Some people prefer paying for a tool like ProWritingAid, but in my opinion this is expensive. Maybe if I forked over the money, I would love it and become a lifetime member...probably not. I hate AI telling me what to fix. I would rather end up paying more in my life and having a human editor look at my work. 

Humans will always be better than AI. At one time, I did have a subscription to Grammarly. I got frustrated with it because I could not pick a style manual to have it use. I could choose "formal" or "business" or other useless garbage, which is why this irritated me. Their plagiarism checker was bad, though, and I recently reviewed their AI checker, which was also bad.

I encourage you to learn your favorite words and then work to reduce the number of times you use them. You may question why you need to do this--but for every favorite word you have, it will probably be someone else's pet peeve.