Things You Can Do to Improve Your Writing Now

More on overuse, accidental or habitual

Actually, I wrote this up on Twitter first, but it's very true and happens all the time. Back in school--maybe you're still in school--English teachers instructed the students not to overuse words. At first, it appeared the teachers meant not to overuse obvious words, like 'obfuscated' for example. "Don't use 'obfuscated' twice in the same short story, blah, blah..." (Obfuscated = confused)

But this isn't really true. Overuse happens with simple words. Let me quote my Twitter feed:

"I wrote a little thingy on that over on Wattpad. I have a small write up on things to make writing better, based on things I've seen.

Things like saying things like things over and over and... Actually, I haven't written that particular item up yet. Overuse of words."

Ok, so you can overuse words that aren't obvious, simple words like 'thing', or even something more obvious, like 'road'. Not kidding. Let's say we're looking at a few paragraphs of a scene involving a road. Some writers keep referring back to the road, over and over and over. I once counted the word road over a dozen times in a couple of paragraphs in a story I had to edit. Same author had trouble with avoiding multiple references to stairwells, walls, etc.

But it doesn't really end at referring needlessly to the same object in a scene. Overuse happens with words that force your sentences to read in the same syntax (sentence structure) again and again.

Biggest, hugest, most prevalent overused word that leads to same sentence structure: as.

Yep. The word 'as' is one of those overused words I see most often in unpolished work. Writers get stuck using it. They get so stuck, they can't seem to think past it. But try anyway. It is a very telling remark on your skills if an editor sees page after page of your prose loaded with 'as' sentences.

Example:

The greatest show on Earth happened as Bob raced his car home from work. He was late. The show had started already. He honked his horn as he swerved in and out of traffic. His cellphone rang as he shot off the exit ramp toward his suburb. He heard sirens. Damn. Turning his head as he drove, the car went off the bank into the ditch.

Ok, you might be thinking this example is too obvious. It's not. I've seen prose with this much reliance on same-syntax sentence structure. You can't just replace 'as' with 'while' to fix this either. You need to learn other ways to write a sentence. The best sort of prose has a rise and fall of words. This rise and fall is caused by sentences that are not the same syntax. Up there in my example, the only rise and fall, or pleasing flow, happened because I had short, other-syntax sentences mixed in with the 'as' sentences. But you can feel the stickiness of the paragraph structure when you hit two 'as' sentences in a row.

And there is the ultimate reason for avoiding overuse: to prevent stuck flow. Never get your reader stuck if you can help it. Always keep the reader moving along in the story. Don't bore him or her with monotony.

After you finish writing your first draft, take an honest look at your work and analyze for repetition of any sort, whether this is favourite words or favourite sentence syntax.