18 June 2010

Bad Habits

I overuse certain words in the first draft:

Really
Actually
Pretty (much) (certain) (sure)
Fairly
Half
A bit
Kind of
Mildly
Simply
Mostly
Slightly

Almost all adverbs (and weasel words!). It amazes me how easy it is for me to read over them, and how frequently I do use them. Particularly in the fiction blog I kept for a year, where I barely polished during the first draft, but even on re-reading a manuscript I've polished and re-polished, these lazy words are everywhere.

I am by nature a qualifier, it seems.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Unfortunately the blog sometimes eats comments. I recommend copying to your clipboard before submitting.

A Note on Amazon's Text to Speech Audiobooks

 Some considerable time ago, Amazon starting cutting back the text to speech options on ebooks.  Very irritating to me, since I liked having...