One time, early in my writing career, I used the word “suddenly” half a dozen times in a single page.
I showed it to my wife. She smiled, patted me on the head, and paraphrased one of her favorite lines from The Princess Bride.
She wasn't wrong, of course.
“Suddenly” is one of those weak, filler words that can slowly drain the life out of your writing if you're not careful. And it doesn't matter if you're writing a book, a blog post, or an email to your boss… they're equal opportunity sentence ruiners.
The good news is if you know to spot them, you can fix them before anyone else gets a chance to see. That's what this guide of mine aims to help you with, and we'll start with arguably the biggest offender.
Adverbs are a stall tactic
Adverbs, especially the “-ly” kind, are a stall tactic. Instead of finding the verb that shows the reader what's happening, you grab a weaker verb and prop it up with an adverb standing next to it.
“She walked angrily to the door” has twice the words and half the punch as “she stormed to the door.”
My old pal “suddenly” is the same trick wearing a different disguise. It doesn't prop up a weak verb, but it tries to manufacture drama the sentence hasn't earned yet by standing in for whatever's supposed to be surprising the reader.
This isn't a ban on every “-ly” word, though. Dialogue is a fair place for them, since real people talk in adverbs constantly, and a status update or casual email can survive one here and there too.
But whenever you're trying to make your writing land, an adverb is usually a sign you haven't found the right verb yet.
“To be” verbs and the passive voice they invite
Was, is, are, were. You can't write anything without them. But they're also the easiest door into passive voice, and passive voice puts distance between the reader and whatever's happening.
“The decision was made by the committee” reads like something that happened to no one in particular. “The committee made the decision” reads like an actual choice, made by actual, living, and breathing people.
Same trick works on feelings too. “John was tired” is a fact you're handing the reader. “John rubbed his eyes and stared at the ceiling” is a scene you're putting them inside of.
Prepositional phrases padding out the sentence
A prepositional phrase such as at the store, near the middle, in the room, isn't wrong. Sometimes you genuinely need that specificity. But go hunting through a page for “at,” “in,” “near,” and “on,” and you'll usually find a handful of sentences that will read much cleaner if the phrase disappears entirely.
Run-on sentences
Run-ons are harder to catch with a simple search, since there's no single word to hunt for. What you're looking for instead is two full, independent thoughts crammed into one sentence with nothing but a comma, or nothing at all, holding them together.
The fix is usually one of three things: a period, a semicolon, or a coordinating conjunction like “and” or “but.”
The best tip for these is to read the sentence out loud. If you run out of breath before you hit a natural stopping point, that's your run-on.
(For this reason, it’s best not to do this immediately after playing a game of chase with your kids, as I’ve done on more than one occasion.)
Nominalizations
A nominalization is a verb or adjective wearing a “noun costume.” Analysis instead of analyze. Suggestion instead of suggest. Disagreement instead of disagree.
“She performed an analysis” is a noun doing a verb's job (and doing it badly). “She analyzed” just does it.
Same with “he made a decision to leave” versus “he decided to leave,” or “we had a discussion about the budget” versus “we discussed the budget.”
The nominalized version always sounds more official. It also always sounds worse, and it's one of the most common habits I see in business writing especially, probably because it feels safer to hide behind a noun than commit to a verb.
Redundant pairs that repeat themselves
Some phrases say the same thing twice. Advance planning. Future plans. Past experience. Close proximity. Add up. Revert back. Join together.
But planning already happens in advance. Experience already happened in the past. Proximity already means close
In each case, one half of the phrase is repeating the other half in different words, and you can cut it without losing meaning.
Grammatical expletives that hide your subject
“It is,” “there is,” “there are,” “there will be.” These constructions have a name (grammatical expletives), and what they all do is push the subject of your sentence out of the driver's seat.
“There are some bloggers who seem to have all the luck” buries the real subject, bloggers, behind a placeholder. “Some bloggers seem to have all the luck” puts them right up front, where they belong.
Same fix works on “it's two hours before the game starts” (the game starts in two hours) or “there was a cat scratching at the door” (a cat scratched at the door).
Whenever a sentence opens with “it is” or “there is,” check whether the real subject is hiding a few words later, waiting to be moved up front.
Dialogue tags stacked too high
If you're writing anything with back-and-forth conversation, like a novel, a script, even a blog post with an interview in it, dialogue tags can pile up. Ever seen “he said” appear after every single line, or even three lines deep into an exchange where the reader already knows who's talking?
Tag the first line or two to establish who's speaking, then let the conversation carry itself. The reader will keep up.
The usual suspects: shrug, nod, smile, reach
Every writer has a small set of physical actions they reach for without thinking. A character shrugs. Then shrugs again two pages later. Then nods, then shrugs once more for good measure. It’s as if you’re planning on each character being portrayed by 1990s Hugh Grant in the story’s film adaptation.
None of these are wrong on their own. The problem is the repetition… the same three or four gestures standing in for every character's every reaction, whether they're mildly annoyed or absolutely furious. When you notice one of these showing up again and again, that's your cue to either vary it or replace it with something more specific to the moment.
Weak, vague adjectives
Big. Small. Tall. Short. Fast. Slow. These words tell the reader almost nothing, because “big” to one reader is “small” to another.
Think of the way author Lee Child describes Jack Reacher:
He was a tall man, more than six feet five in his shoes, heavily built, all bone and muscle…
That's a lot clearer than “He was a big guy,” don'tcha think?
Timid opinion markers
“I feel that,” “I believe that,” “in my opinion.” If you're writing a blog post, an essay, or anything meant to make an argument, these phrases undercut you.
“I feel that college isn't worth it for everyone” is a hedge. “College isn't worth it for everyone” is a stance. If you believe something enough to write it down, you don't need to remind the reader it's your opinion. They already know they're reading your writing.
Weak phrasal verbs
Figure out. Point out. Put off. Go into. These two-word combinations aren't wrong, but they're almost always standing in for a single, stronger verb that would say the same thing with less clutter.
“Figure out” becomes determine or decide. “Point out” becomes mention or note. “Put off” becomes postpone or delay.
None of these swaps change your meaning, but they do tighten the sentence around it.
The specific words worth hunting down
Beyond the categories above, there's a shortlist of individual words and phrases that show up in nearly everything I've ever edited or been edited on. None of them are forbidden, but they’re worth a second look if you spot one.
Feeling and thinking words like felt, feel, think, thought, wonder, and believe. These tend to sit between the reader and the moment instead of putting them inside it. “I thought the food tasted horrible” is a report. “Yuck, that food made me gag” is a reaction.
Then. A workhorse word that makes a sentence feel like a list of events instead of a scene. “I tripped, then fell, then everyone laughed” reads slower than “I tripped, fell, and everyone laughed.”
Breathing words like breathe, breath, inhale, and exhale. A little goes a long way here.
Really and very. Almost always a sign a stronger word is sitting one step away. “Very tired” is weak. “Exhausted” is a roundhouse kick to the face.
Just. One of the easiest words to delete without anyone noticing it's gone. “He just wants to be loved” loses nothing when it becomes “he wants to be loved.”
That. Necessary sometimes, but overused constantly. “Dave told Jason that that explosion was deliberate” survives just fine as “Dave told Jason the explosion was deliberate.”
Literally. Unless you’re Rob Lowe on TV’s Parks and Recreation, save it for when you mean it. If nothing in the sentence is happening in a literal sense, the word is doing nothing but adding syllables.
About. It’s vague when it comes to numbers. “About 20 people showed up” works fine in conversation, but “roughly 20 people” or “somewhere between 15 and 20” gives a reader something more precise.
Up and down, when they're not doing anything. Sit down, stand up, kneel down, lift up. The direction is already built into the verb. You rarely need the extra word riding along beside it.
Have got. A tautology hiding in plain sight. “She's got to leave” loses nothing by becoming “she has to leave,” or better yet, “she must leave.”
Sort of, kind of. Fine in conversation, but it’s weak on the page. “The meeting went kind of on schedule” is really just “the meeting went on schedule,” with a hedge tacked onto the front.
Throat-clearing phrases. At the end of the day. For all intents and purposes. Due to the fact that. In order to. At this point in time. Needless to say. These phrases feel like they're saying something while saying nothing at all. They’re padding that shows up when you're trying to sound formal instead of trying to be clear. Cut them and the sentence underneath almost always improves.
How to find these in your writing
The tool is simple: find and replace. You already have it in whatever you're writing in. In Google Docs, it's under Edit, then Find and Replace (or just Ctrl+H). In Word, it's the same shortcut. Pick one word from the list above, search your whole document for it, and go through the results one at a time.
And if you're writing a book in Atticus, it's built right into the software with a bit more polish. Hit the magnifying glass icon, and you can search a single chapter or the whole manuscript at once, with a running count of how many times that word shows up in each chapter as you go. If you'd rather have software flag these words for you automatically instead of hunting one at a time, ProWritingAid does that, and it works directly inside Atticus.
One friendly tip, though…
Don’t try to edit everything in one pass. Depending on your writing tendencies, it could be a lot. Instead, pick the category, word, or phrase you know you do often (most likely, one jumped to mind while you were reading this guide), and focus on it first. Then you can do the rest in round two.
Good luck.
