Search and Replace: John's Pet Peeves Number 8

It's been a while since I've written a pet peeve. This one is aimed at the guy in the mirror because it's my own writing that sometimes annoys me. Over time I've discovered a list of things I can search for after a draft is complete. The more I write, the less I have to rely on this list, but it still saves me and my editors a lot of time by finding problems early.

Also, I keep seeing social media posts on self-editing and words to avoid while writing. I'm going to share my current Search and Replace (or Search and Destroy) list and just point people here as needed. Some of these came from lists, but many are things I've discovered in my own writing.

The Search part is mandatory. The Destroy part is optional since every one of these may be not only valid but the best choice in some circumstance.

I've used these to fix hundreds of instances of passive voice in a manuscript in one evening before. That's a huge time savings on hunting down and fixing things one at a time as you read through a manuscript.

Here's a post at the Writer's Circle of the sort of thing I've kept an eye out for so I can add to my list.

Adverbs

Adverbs can often be replaced with stronger phrasing. The easiest way is to look for the most common adverb ending followed by a space. The space is important since you don't want words with "ly" in the middle. This will be a long slog of a search so you may want to delay it until after you've done the easier ones.

• "ly "

Bad Starts

The following entries are usually a bad way to start a sentence. Turn on the flag to match capitalization in the advanced search settings for these. These starts set might work well for folk tales or other special cases so your mileage may vary.

• There is
• There was
• There are
• There were

Weak Words

Weak or overused words to remove or replace in most cases.

• just
• very
• really
• suddenly
• amazing
• awesome
• that
• already
• look
• there
• over
• try
• so

Passive Voice

Passive voice flags, which could also indicate weak words as shown above.

• started/starting/starts
• begin/began/begins
• were
• is
• are
• have been
• had been
• would be
• would have
• to be
• could still

Senses and Emotion

Sensory or emotional crutches can be replaced with showing a scene instead of shortcutting it by telling us the emotions and senses involved. Show the scene that generates the input or thought.

• felt
• realized
• saw
• heard
• smelled
• seemed
• decided

More Passive Voice

Passive voice with wildcards is a great timesaver in Word. Open the advanced search dialog and turn on wildcards. Then you can search for these passive voice hunters. Again, they're not all bad. Just mostly bad. The idea is to replace things like "was jumping" with "jumped."

• [Ww]as [A-z]@ed
• [Ww]as [A-z]@ing
• [Hh]ad [A-z]@ed
• [Hh]ave [A-z]@ed
• [Bb]een [A-z]@ing

Obscure Stuff

Past perfect tense. This is a bit obscure, but it introduces hesitation.

• had always

Checking Dialog Tags

You can also find lots of dialog tags that could be bad, confusing, or in need of clarification with these wildcards. It finds lots of false positives, so it's not always useful. You can find stuff like "He barked" with this.

• [Hh]e [A-z]@ed
• [Ss]he [A-z]@ed

Layout

Simple search and replace can fix lots of things. Word uses ^p as a paragraph marker when not in wildcard mode. You can get rid of spaces at the start and end of paragraphs with two simple searches, and then nuke all accidental double spaces. You're not one of those types who LIKES double spaces after a period, are you? ;)

• Replace " ^p" with "^p"
• Replace "^p " with "^p"
• Replace two spaces with one.

And there you have it. That's the current state of my Search and Destroy list. Have fun!