The Words You Repeat Without Noticing

Bysteve
1920s Little Nemo style comic strip illustration: a woman writer holds a magnifying glass over her manuscript at a night desk, identical unreadable word-glyphs floating up from the page, one circled in red

Every writer has five or six words they can’t stop using. Ask ten writers to name theirs and you’ll get nine wrong answers.

Mine is “that.” I’ve spent years training myself to hear it, and it still slips into every draft I write. Yours might be “just,” or “suddenly,” or “seemed.” Whatever it is, you typed it fresh every time. The reader experiences it as a tic.

Two kinds of repetition to hunt:

Echoes. The same distinctive word twice in one scene. “Particular” in paragraph two, “particular” again in paragraph six. Nobody can name what broke the spell. It broke anyway.

Crutches. Your personal hedges and fillers, spread thin across the whole book: “just,” “looked,” “turned,” “seemed.” No single page looks guilty, so nothing trips your ear while drafting. Only a frequency count exposes them.

Paste your last chapter into any word-frequency counter (the free ones online take ten seconds). Ignore “the,” “and,” “said,” and your character names. The words left at the top of the list are yours. Search the manuscript for each one and ask: does this word earn its place, or is it a habit? Cut the habit. Keep what earns.

Repetition you planned is rhythm. Repetition you didn’t notice is a stutter. The reader hears both.

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