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r/writing • … • u/Samstown_4077

Overused/Useless Words/phrases with count in my novel - how bad is it?

After going through my draft in what I call a "rough and dirty" way, I found a lot of words that I would say are overused and/or useless. For some words, it surely depends on the context of the situation. However, I am not sure how many times a word has to appear before it becomes annoying to the reader. And I am for sure not the only writer having that trouble.

Just for fun, I did a count and thought, why not ask the community what they think about the number of times the words I consider overused/useless have been used.

Note; I'm not a professional, this would be my first published novel, although I've been writing unpublished stories all my life, which doesn't mean I have any talent.

To give you an idea, it's a romance drama novel with 95k words so far.

Here are the words that jumped out at me. Which ones you think are too much, okay and/or fine? And which words/phrases do you think I should review/exchange? Is someone doing this the same way, counting them and then getting rid of them?

(hope the formatting is not totally off)

| moment 157 | because 125 | without 131

| quickly 74 | for a moment 54 | Together 54

| maybe 53 | Suddenly 52 | the next… 47

| yet 44 | in the end 20 | with that (said etc) 17

| at first 15 | at times 14 | a lot (of) 14

| naturally 6 | at that moment 5 | anymore 16

| out of breath 3 | sooner or later 3 | a second later 3

edit: formatting

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