Writing Tics

Nathan Bransford had a terrific post the other day, You Tell Me: What is Your Writing Tic? These are the bad habits that creep into our writing at alarming rates. Characters sighing all over the place, or rolling their eyes or nodding. I read through many of the comments and felt better that several people shared one of my big ones, using the word "just." I also found a lot of other things to be on the look out for in my own writing.

Another useful tip I found in the comments was a link about Wordle, a free online tool for creating word clouds. Word clouds show you which words you use most often in a piece of writing. Tracy Buchanan explains it really well in the post What Are Your "Crutch" Words. The beautiful thing about Wordle is that you can cut and paste your entire novel into the cloud generator and see what words you've overused.

I created a word cloud of my novel in progress and made a list of words to seek and destroy when I edit. I probably don't have to tell you that the word "just" was bigger than I'd hoped. On the plus side (?), I used the word "back" even more often.