Writing - self-editing

There are many tasks a writer must perform when self-editing. At the later stages, when the book is as good as finished – that is it’s ready for a final read-through – one task is to check for word repetition.

No writer can avoid this happening; at certain times in the writing process, certain words cling on, sometimes in the subconscious, and are used too often. Each writer will have their own words and phrases which they tend to fall back upon without even noticing. At the time of writing there’s nothing wrong with this, it’s good to maintain the writing flow rather than be concerned with word-repetition.

After having written well over 2 million published words, I’m aware of some words that I tend to opt for too frequently, hence the list below.

In my years of editing other people’s work I find that the most repeated words for many an author are: smiled, laughed, nodded, saw, pointed, suddenly, and shrugged. One of the biggest mistyped is ‘though’ for ‘through’ and vice versa, which a spell-checker won’t detect.

Bearing in mind that this word-repetition check was against my current book of about 105,000 words, there are not too many word repetitions anyway; mainly because I’ve become familiar with most, so consciously avoid ‘laughed’ and ‘sighed’, for example, while not interfering with the flow.

I recommend you conduct a search for certain words. You might be surprised at the number of highlighted words you discover on the same page and often close together!

My search turned up these shown below.

Once you’ve found the word, scroll through the text, examining each highlighted example, seeing if the word is actually necessary at all, or maybe a different word might suffice and be an improvement. Try to reduce the frequency of the word where several are shown in close proximity; it’s not unusual for the same word to appear four or more times in a single paragraph!

This process sometimes reveals inconsistencies and logic errors in the text, which is all to the good. 

Certain words are not always necessary – the biggest culprits being ‘down’ as in ‘sat down’ and ‘up’ in ‘stood up’; there are similar variants.

 Repeated words template – August 2021

Repeated word	Before	After edit	Repeated word	Before	After edit
smiled	32	16	shook	37	28
nodded	84	32	appeared	47	39
laughed	14	11	peered	21	15
grinned	13	11	abruptly	13	11
sighed	14	12	shrugged	22	16
looked	55	38	eyed	20	17
moment	32	19	instant	22	20
glanced	25	21	gazed	6	6
few	68	44	some	23	22
down	103	67	up	180	116
out	103	67	back	80	66
just	51	34	askance	2	2
called	36	31	glimpsed	14	12
saw	36	35	gestured	23	20
walked	29	26	sensed	26	21
ran	43	32	believed	20	17
pointed	27	23	strode	17	15
suddenly	11	10	away	73	52
seemed	91	49	off	85	62
felt	69	58	noticed	44	40
thought	50	41	though	91	59
stepped	53	35	turned	80	51

You will see on the list that some variants are shown close together: for example, moment and instant; few and some; gazed and glanced; down and up. So beware of substituting one repetitive word with another on the list; yes, it can be done, but adjust the total so you know where you are.

Good luck.