: Re: How do I get rid of overused words in my story? I did a word frequency analysis on my story. Unsurprisingly, the most over-used words often corresponded to passages where I was lazy with my

@Yeniel532

Vote Up Vote Down

Possibly the underlying issue is that you're trying to portray a particular sentiment or idea, and you keep doing it in the same way.
In your example, it seems that you're trying to show that Abel is attempting to get a serious point across and show his firm stance on a situation, but not being too strict or overbearing about it. Him chuckling after saying that sentence would certainly get that point across, but in order to get around the repetition, you may need to entirely restructure the sentence.

"No 'we'll see', bring him around. I’m old, you have to listen to me."
The glimmer in his eyes told Sara that he wasn't being serious, but she got the sense that if she failed, that glimmer would quickly fade to be replaced with something less friendly.
She nodded wordlessly, and he dismissed her.
"Take care, Sara."

Obviously it can be anything you want, but this shows that by restructuring the sentence a little, you can completely subvert the need for having to find a direct word replacement.
It's fine to repeat words over and over, every writer will have something that they constantly fall back on, the trick is to identify it (which you've already done). Then it's just a case of picking up on the those instances when you're editing, and remove a few to make the story more balanced.
In the future you may never use the word chuckled again because you'll be hyper-aware that it is one of the words you have previously overused, but at that point you'll probably write something else that becomes too abundant in your work. Then it will simply be a case of repeating the process for that word or phrase.

(0)

Login to post a comment!