Ok, you’ve identified some comfort words and developed a habit of searching for them as part of your revision and cleanup process. So you can find them. Now what?
Like most strong writing habits, shifting the reliance on the same old thought placeholders depends on your understanding your own contexts a bit more fully. But the internet likes listicles and step-by-step how-tos, so let’s do one of those for once.
Fixing your fillers: a formula.
- As you revise, start a list of your most common words. If your brain isn’t spotting them, try a tool like a Word Cloud to organize your words by frequency of usage.
- Find those words, every time you write. I already covered this, and hopefully you’re starting here today.
- As you train your brain to notice the words, start developing a set of possible replacements. There’s no shortcut here: this will take at least a few minutes of thesaurus-ing and considering nuance and context.
- Rinse.
- Repeat.
Really, the goal here is to get out of your own writing flow into an editorial mindset where you can stop seeing the sentences/paragraphs/pages and focus on the words themselves. This might require walking away from your draft and coming back fresh–at first, but with regular practice, most writers can develop a real-time self-check mechanism that should decrease the need for an editing pass. And there’s always editors to help you with this work if you’d rather spend your time developing other skills.
Something Polished 