Evil Words

I'm gonna kinda be lazy today.  I know, been lazy for a while . . .

This is my evil word list.  Everyone who's worked with me knows about it.  Perhaps not the full list, but they know.  Hopefully, this is self-explanatory.  It's a guideline for words you should avoid or use sparingly.  I don't like to see more than four of these every 250 words.  And yes, I count them.  Computers are wonderful things. 

It's not that these words in and of themselves are evil.  They usually signal another problem in the writing skills. All adverbs & to a degree, adjectives: when writing you want to stick to nouns and verbs as much as possible.  I touched on this a little in blog two, but the truth is 'he ran fast' would be much better served by 'he dashed.'  So get rid the adverb/adjective and try to use nouns and verbs to accurately describe the scene.

Hedging words: same thing.  'He didn't quite smile.'  If he didn't quite smile, what did he do?  'He smirked' will serve better than a hedging word.  And aaaaa llllooooottttt of these words are adverbs, so it's a category that repeats itself.  AND WE NEVER WANT TO REPEAT OURSELVES.  But that category is particularly bad adverbs.

Overused words are words that novice authors really don't have a way of knowing without experience.  Most published books have cleaned up overused words because they've been fleeced by an editor.  Once you start to see them abused, you'll identify them quickly.  I have more patience with thing than feel, but both make me cringe when I see thing. And really, what does beautiful mean?  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  So describe WHAT the beholder sees.

Cerebral words:  These all get used wwwaaaaaayyyyyyy too much.  Cerebral words signal that an author is writing passive voice or telling instead of showing.  The action needs to stay action and stay out of your character's head as much as possible.  It's almost impossible to pull off good writing when using too many thought terms. 'I thought I saw a ghost.'  'The mist had coagulated into human form, tricking my eyes.'

And lastly: Mundane actions.  This is another one that's hard for novice authors to pick up on.  Editors are supposed to clean this last category up, but the more self-published and e-pubbed stuff I read, the more of the last category I see.  Which means the editor is as lazy as the author.  Nothing wrong exactly with the last category, except that the author has decided they don't want to work at describing something.  Me, I read, 'he nodded' twenty times and the character becomes a bobble head doll. That's fine for a rough draft, get through it.  But when refining the draft, those words need to go.   Printed books rarely let an author get away with that level of writing. 

All adverbs & to a degree, adjectives

Hedging words:

quite

seem,

sure,

almost,

maybe,

certain,

doubt,

so

some

suppose,

might,

lead-in & hedging phrases

just,

really,

kind of/sort of

perhaps

appear

Overused words:

thing,

feel,

hope

sense,

AND

there is/are/was/were,

beauty/beautiful

obvious

Cerebral words:

thought,

know,

consider,

recognize,

idea,

imagine,

assume,

understand,

believe,

wonder,

remind,

Mundane actions:

nod,

shook,

smile,

shrug

laugh,

Look & eyes

turn,

push,

grin,

giggle,

sigh,

pull

groan,

pain,

admit,

see/saw,

shrug

pause

 OK, that's enough for a Sunday morning.