Words are the buildings blocks of prose, but not all of them are load-bearing. Some words clutter the page and make our writing sound wishy-washy, dry, or awkward. To strengthen your work, search for these 44 suspects and ask yourself: are they doing more harm than good?
Qualifiers
When we want to say something but don’t want to stand behind it, out comes the qualifier.
That sweater just makes you look a little fat.
It doesn’t change what you’re saying, but it adds a wishy-washy, insecure flavor. No one likes the taste of wishy-washy; give it up.
Granted, you’ll need them occasionally.
Most women are between the ages of 20 and 60.
But beware these culprits:
- a bit
- a little
- almost
- just
- kind of
- likely
- most
- only
- probably
- quite
- rather
- some
Blandifiers
When our words aren’t strong enough but we’re too lazy to come up with better ones, we’ll use a bland modifier to make up the difference.
I really like your painting; it’s very pretty.
Did I say “make up the difference”? I meant “add clutter.” Blandifiers make sentences dull and pedestrian. If you need more punch in your prose, dump the original word and use a stronger replacement.
I love your painting; it’s gorgeous.
It will make your writing tighter and more powerful.
However, when wielded with full awareness of their limitations, blandifiers can add personality and emotion:
Don’t call me that. Ever.
Search out these evil-doers:
- very
- ever
- specifically
- easily
- surely
- totally
- perfectly
- too
- so
- really
- actually
Urgency Pretenders
We use these several words to signal when an action is sudden or unexpected. The problem is that readers can’t be told when an action is sudden; they have to feel it themselves. This is useless:
Maria sat next to David. He suddenly punched her in the gut.
Want an action to feel abrupt? Congratulations, all you have to do is nothing.
Maria sat next to David. She punched him in the gut.
The context is doing all the work. The first sentence makes the reader expect affectionate interaction, not a punch. Urgency signals are only useful when readers would believe the action was gradual:
David drank and joked with us for three hours, then abruptly left.
Leaving a social gathering involves waving and goodbyes. Here, “abruptly” tells readers he skipped the social niceties.
- suddenly
- abruptly
- immediately
Stallers
Stallers appear when we want to narrate action, yet… don’t want action? So we stall for time by pushing the action behind a pile of clutter.
If you start to feel dizzy, call for help.
When it comes to action, just do it; don’t try to begin to do it. You’ll feel better when it’s over with.
Unless the distinction matters. In that case, stall as you need to:
She tried to tame the dragon, but it flew away.
Look out for these perpetrators:
- able to
- supposed to
- seem to
- try to
- best to
- decide to
- start to
- begin to
- have to
- need to
- going to
Loiterers
What are these phrases trying to achieve while they sit around doing nothing? Your guess is as good as mine.
It is a fact that snakes have scales.
Loiterers don’t deserve the space they’re getting, except on rare occasions:
Our hero may be gone, but there is still hope.
Keep an eye out for these miscreants:
- there are/is
- I think/know
- you can/should
- itself/himself/herself
- the fact that
- type of
- is that it
Many of us use clutter words by habit, and it can be a hard habit to break. But if you regularly check your work and correct it, you’ll get there.
P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?
Great advice.
Elmore Leonard had the Urgency Pretenders on his list of writing rules. Since seeing his list the use of “suddenly” does stand out as lazy writing.
Thanks!
Personally I find “suddenly” more melodramatic than lazy. I think it happens when writers want to add excitement to their story, but they don’t know to do it properly. You can’t tell your audience an event is sudden in the same way you can’t tell them it’s terrifying or sad. You have to write something that invokes excitement, terror, or sadness.
This is a fabulous list. I won’t disagree with any of the words here, but if I were to add one, it would be “soon”. E.g. : “She soon saw that her mom had gone to the store.”
I had a friend who used this word almost constantly when characters would perform an action, and it was entirely unnecessary. I also see it used frequently by budding writers, and it only serves for me to make the work feel amateurish.
Great addition. I’ll keep my eye out for that one.
Great article.
Why did you write, “Maria sat next to David. HE suddenly punched HER in the gut” and then make it “Maria sat next to David. SHE punched HIM in the gut”? Capitalization is my own.
I don’t remember, but I suspect I just wanted to distribute gender evenly, particularly as violence is involved.
Cool.
I get it’s bad to use these words in writing, but is it okay to use these words in the dialogue? People in real life don’t speak “with punch”.
Sometimes dialogue does call for clutter words you wouldn’t want to use in narration. The same principle of not having unnecessary words cluttering dialogue still applies, the effect you’re trying to create with dialogue is just different. For instance, if you want your character to be long-winded or nervously spew out word-vomit, those extra words are not unnecessary, they have a purpose.
This is a great list. (Ctrl+F in my document for some of these words is… embarrassing.)
I overuse “of course” all the time. I think it’s a type of qualifier — I’m insecure about whatever statement I just made, so I try to make it seem more authoritative by using “of course.” And sometimes I’m uncertain whether or not the audience already knows a piece of information, and am too lazy to check whether I mentioned it earlier and forgot about it, so I use “of course” as a (bad) cover to try and have it both ways.
Is it okay to break the rules and use “unnecessary” words if they suit the voice of the character whose head you’re in? Or for comedic value?
For example, I feel that, “She liked him” is flat. But, “She thought she maybe possibly did in fact kind of like him. But she wasn’t sure” is a) funnier and b) expresses the character’s voice and emotional gymnastics.
Or is efficiency of words always best?
I would say it depends.
For one thing, it depends on the tone of your story. For a comedic story, this might work, although I’d only use ‘maybe’ or ‘possibly’ – both is a little much.
For another thing, it depends on how deep your are in the head of the character. If it’s your viewpoint character and you’re writing in a very close third perspective, it can work. If you keep more distance to the character a ‘she thought she might like him, but she wasn’t sure’ might be better.
Twitter can be good practice for this
When you only have 280 characters*, you HAVE to lose unnecessary words
*Letters, numbers, spaces, etc. Not 280 different people, all of whom have major arcs and you have to keep track of all of them to understand the story
While these words and phrades are typically pointless filler in prose, there’s a common idea that they’re also inherently worthless in speech and written dialogue, which doesn’t reflect the reality of language.
While these words are filler in a lot of cases, their status as filler is often overstated by those looking purely from a perspective of syntactical efficiency. Linguistically, however, many seemingly extraneous words and phrases often convey nuance that facilitates not just meaning, but understanding.
To take the example of “It is a fact that snakes have scales”: “it is a fact” establishes that “snakes have scales” is a point that the speaker either expects you to already agree with, or wants you to accept. This makes it clearer that, moving on, the speaker is speaking with the understanding that both of you are cognizant of snakes having scales.
This seems superfluous from a purely syntactical perspective, because “snakes have scales” communicates the same literal information as “it is a fact that snakes have scales.” However, because so much of communication goes beyond the literal meaning of words, this extra wording helps ensure both parties are on the same page.
Besides that, I’m unsure of “there be” and related forms being extraneous. The phrase communicates existence (or the lack thereof in negative phrases). I can see how it’d be filler in prose (you can just show the thing in question in most cases), but you can’t drop it from speech where it’s present without removing that meaning, except in contexts which allow it to be elided (typically at the start of a sentence).
I like to appreciate just how much we subconsciously communicate. It’s something I’ve looked into quite a bit!