There's a lot of culprits when it comes to any piece of work, whether it's a short story, a novel, or even an audio drama. And while they might be all right individually, much like adverbs, they can sneak up on you, and bloat your word count.
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| Don't apologize... just cut! |
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The Usual Suspects
During my school days my parents divvied up their responsibilities. My father was primarily my math and science tutor, while my mother checked my English homework. One night it was just my father and I at the dinner table while he went over my letters for the night. He pointed out at least half a dozen times I'd used the word that, and told me to remove them because they wasted space, and added nothing to what I was saying.
At the time I was annoyed at the criticism, mostly because I was a middle schooler, and it was already too late in the evening for me to do anything even if my homework was done. With that said, in the years since then, I've recognized the wisdom in this criticism. This word is one of several on my list of filler words I try to eliminate, but as with the italicized example a sentence ago, remember you aren't trying to eliminate the use of entire words; just learning to recognize when they aren't necessary.
Okay? Okay.
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| So, who's on the Most Wanted list? |
We've already mentioned how that tends to creep into our works, but what other culprits do we have to deal with? Well...
- However- This is one I'm particularly bad about. It takes up a lot of space, and it's a favorite for folks who tend to rely on sentence splices when their thoughts are going a mile a minute.
- Though- However's partner in crime, though is a word that's often used to avoid the need to end one sentence, and begin another one.
- Very- For those who remember Dead Poets Society, this is a word we know to side eye. Getting out of the habit of relying on this word by replacing the need for it (very tired becomes exhausted, very pretty becomes stunning, and so on) is the best way to clear it off the page.
- Actually- This one is perfectly fine in dialogue, but most of the time you can kick it from your sentence if it's outside of quotation marks. It shares this distinction with its more polite cousin quite.
- Really- This word can serve a lot of functions, but your story is often better for cutting it out as many times as you can. As with many of the others, this one can lend authenticity to dialogue, but should be spare outside the words and thoughts of your characters.
That's 7 words on the hit list. It doesn't seem like much, does it? Go through something you've written, though, and start eliminating them. Then compare the word count of the manuscript before and after. If you had a short story, you probably managed to cut out two dozen words or more. If you're looking at a novel? You might have just chopped out several thousand words by the time you got rid of every instance you didn't need.
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