A while back, I wrote about crutch words and the approach I took to weeding them out. A working editor is a work in progress, and I am no exception. I developed a four-word approach to “Words That Must Be Scrutinized!!!” (Cue really loud gong.) The offending words are “suddenly,” “just,” “very,” and “that.” Yes, “that” can be a crutch word. The story analysis project I’m finishing up as I write this also abused “and.” Mind you, the author is an admitted first-time writer who does not speak US English trying to write in US English. English as a first language is weird enough. I get headaches rendering an alien language into Elizabethan English to convey excessive formality, so I get it.

I’ve modified since then. I don’t do a “that” check anymore. That is used more often legitimately than as a crutch, so you could easily get a thousand instances of it in a long manuscript. ProWritingAid is pretty good at flagging it when it’s used to join a long sentence together. Never say “The fact that…” Just say “The fact…”

But I got so zealous about purging and replacing “that” with “who,” “how,” and “which,” that I got pushback from both author and publisher. (The author turned around and wrote a blurb for my editing work, so it’s a case of making good better.) So now, I look to see if “that” is unnecessary in context. 

I still go after “very” and “suddenly.” In fact, I get mad if I can’t delete “suddenly.” “Just” remains a sticking point. It’s the most abused of the three. One writer, who’s been around for decades, had seven instances on one page! It is a monumental pain in the ass to weed those out, and in a couple of instances, I had to leave two on the page. But it’s a crutch word.

Once upona, I used to go after “should” because Bestelling Author™, who had a writing course®, said it’s a bad word. Probably is. Too many “shoulds” on a page will annoy the reader without them realizing why. I quit doing that because it ended up giving me stilted prose in my own work and annoyed an editing client early on. This is also I don’t do writing books. I publish independently or small press, so until they start showing up on bestseller lists or I have a waiting list for my services, I’m not going to be a shill and pretend to know more than I do. Here, I’m sharing what I see on the job. 

So it’s “very,” “suddenly,” and “just.” I’ve added one more because I caught it in print in one of my own books: form. Why is “form” bad? It’s not as long as you are filling out a form, you’re admiring that other person’s cute form, or your mother-in-law, in her rage, assumes her demon form.* But every so often, in the heat of writing, we type “form” instead of “from.” It’s something that even an editor can miss. We’re not perfect, and two errors can hide a third in plain site. So I check all the instances of “form.” 99% of the time, they’re all correct. That remaining one percent usually sees a character bopping out to Sinatra singing “The Girl Form Ipamena.” So, yeah, the writer probably wants to know about that typo.

As I said before, different editors have different approaches. Some will zap anything with an “-ly” in it. Some have long lists of words they never want to see in a manuscript again. Others just read it in context and decide if it sticks out like a sore cliche.  

* Actually, my mother-in-law is a sweet 80-year-old lady. My ex-mother-in-law is a nice Mormon lady with a decidedly un-Mormon sense of humor who definitely gave it to her daughter. Who happens to be my favorite ex. I’ve married often. And well. Not many people can say that.