: Re: How do you avoid smiling, head-bobbing characters? Posting on a question about word frequency data, I read an excellent answer from @DPT about avoiding words that become so frequent, they're problematic.

@Phylliss352

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I had a similar concern once when, having happened upon this image, I thought to check how often characters sighed in one of my manuscripts. It happened about 1.5 times per chapter, which I felt was excessive. My trick to fixing this was simple: visualise the scene as if it were part of TV show, imagine what the actors would be doing to bring the scene alive, and describe that instead of the sighing. This may sound like it just replaces one repeated thing with another, but it didn't because I realised every sigh meant something different. So does every nod, and every smile. In fact, the real reason to replace these repetitive descriptions isn't that it reduces repetition; it's that it shows the various things people think across the story much more insightfully.

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