Fuddland

Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See [But Can Easily Fix When They Do] is a very entertaining read — and informative too, listing the top grammatical or stylistic errors that have most editors reaching for their red pen or — worse — their rejection letter template.

Most interesting to me was the idea of unconsciously repeated ‘crutch words’ — words or phrases that the writer uses rather too often without realising it.

“Crutch words are usually unremarkable. That’s why they slip under editorial radar - they’re not even worth repeating, but there you have it, pop, pop, pop, up they come. Readers, however, notice them, get irked by them and are eventually distracted by them, and down goes your book, never to be opened again.”

The article lists a few examples — Hilary Clinton’s word is ‘eager’; in On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s is ‘sad’. mrtn tells me Tony Blair’s crutch word is ‘sincerely’ — oh the irony. This left me wondering what mine was; fortunately I have Paul Hammond’s WordStats MT plugin at my disposal and can easily find out the candidates. Taking all my weblog entries from May 2002 to December 2003 [about 130,500 words], and throwing out the to-be-expected words like ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘a’, ‘of’, etc., we get the following list [number of occurrences in brackets]:

1. time [330]

2. think [297]

3. know [229]

4. people [224]

5. really [214]

6. other [210]

7. will [209]

8. last [200]

9. over [197]

10. back [195]

11. being [193]

12. first [186]

13. could [181]

14. going [179]

15. go [174]

I don’t know if this reveals some kind of psychological information, I just thought it was quite interesting. If I had more time [ha, there I go again] I’d look at the distribution of the words through time [gah, and again!] — did I go through phases of overusing a particular word? If I’d had to have guessed what my crutch word was, I would have nominated ‘actually’ [used on 95 occasions] or ‘apparently’ [a piddling 42 appearances]. I’ve kept the entire list if anyone wants to see it.

Update: Almost forgot — link to Ten Mistakes… via Monday’s paranoidfish.org/links.

#1

Lyle | 2004 / 01 / 20 – 13:22

Yes, I definitely have crutch words/phrases. (And no, not the obscenities - amazing as this may seem)

I think the main one is still “Personally”, particularly when used to express an opinion. However, I know there are several others, although when I become aware that I’ve been using them too much, I work hard to stop using them for a while. After all, it must be boring reading the same phrase time and again - it’s certainly so for writing them. *Grin*

#2

Daisy | 2004 / 01 / 21 – 13:00

Getting straight to the point: why isn’t Daisy on the list?

#3

Daisy | 2004 / 01 / 21 – 13:02

And Lyle - you are NEVER boring!

#4

Daisy | 2004 / 01 / 21 – 13:02

and neither are you babes (in case the inference was that…) Okay, I’ll shut up now.

#5

David | 2004 / 01 / 21 – 13:16

Re #2: It’s on the complete list — a whopping 2 occurrences [right next to ‘chain’, heh heh]. I usually try to refer to you indirectly [‘thingy’, ‘what’s her name’ etc.]. ;)

Re #4: ‘Babes’?

#6

bsag | 2004 / 01 / 24 – 16:08

That was a great article, but one of those things you read thinking, “Oh no, I do that. And that, and I write like that all the time…” and end up so self-conscious that you can’t sentence write a proper to life save your.

#7

David | 2004 / 01 / 24 – 22:28

Re #6: You’re too modest — I bet you had to really think about it to get that last sentence deliberately wrong. It was deliberate, wasn’t it? ;)

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