What are your Verbal Tics?

Editing out those weasels

I’m at the editing stage of my third book. Just out of interest, I copied and pasted the whole manuscript (96,000 words) into a Word Cloud generator (just type those three words into a search engine and loads of sites will appear). Then you can insert some text and it will instantly produce a diagram of the words you use most (shown in the larger fonts in the example above – which is in fact of my novel). It was fascinating.

Not surprisingly, the names of my characters are the largest words. I’m happy with that: it shows I am focussing on my main protagonists in the book which is as it should be. But a closer look reveals some worrying tendencies: the verb ‘nodded’ features quite prominently. I know it’s a verbal tic but for some reason I can’t help putting it into a first draft. Then I read it through and am reminded of those fake dogs people used to buy to sit in the back of their cars, constantly nodding their heads. They used to annoy me and I would imagine all those characters nodding will annoy my readers. So I’ll do a ‘search and find’, and cut them out. I’ll check the instances of ‘seemed’ and ‘perhaps’ too. They might be fine in context – I’ll have to see – but on the other hand they might make my characters too tentative and wishy washy: not something that would appeal to readers so some of those might have to go too. ‘Felt,’ ‘looked’ and ‘thought’ might need to go too. Writers should try to remove any filters which separate the reader from the characters (there’s a blog article on it here)

I’ll check on the adverbs too – ‘just,’ ‘although,’ and ‘only’ – if they can’t earn their place they’ll have to go, along with the other Weasel words (see the blog article of that name for more details).

Hopefully my final manuscript will be all the better for this forensic editing. And afterwards I’ll have a nice poster for my wall too!