Weed words can ruin our prose

Weeds are plants that, however decorative or useful they may be, are in the wrong place.

In writing, all of us have favourite words that are like weeds in our prose.

I usually call them fetish words, because we use them ritualistically, unconsciously, out of habit. I thought that term might give you the wrong idea about this post.

The easiest way to identify weed words is look at frequency. If you've written 2,000 words and 'however' occurs 6 times, I recommend that's 5 times too often.

Find something you wrote in the recent past, preferably a first draft, and check it over for fetish words. 'So,' is a common example, but a weed word can be anything. Like a plant weed, weed words are perfectly acceptable words in themselves, but they are in the wrong place. Mr O was recently reading a book and threatened to scream if he saw 'literally' even one more time. Weed words are written verbal ticks. We don't tend to notice them, bit others do. A signature phrase is okay, a rampant and invasive case of weed words is not.

Happy weeding, and may your prose be the better for it. Be warned, new weed words are ready to sprout up whenever our attention wanders. And like garden weeds, occasionally we decide they aren't a weed at all but are exactly what's needed in this spot.

Sent from my iPhone