: Re: Facial expressions as part of dialogue - getting rid of a verbal tic I noticed a verbal tic in my writing: He looked surprised He looked confused He looked abashed Sometimes

@Jessie137

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This looks like a problem with Filter Words. The term is credited to Janet Burroway in her book On Writing, and it's related to the problem of telling, not showing:

“As a fiction writer you will often be working through ‘some observing consciousness’. Yet when you step back and ask readers to step back and observe the observer — to look at [the character] rather than through the character—you start to tell-not-show and rip us briefly out of the scene.”

The filter in this concept (a bad thing) is usually a 3rd-person description of a character's sensory observation. It has the same "reader-distancing" problem as tell-not-show. Rather than allowing the reader to experience this sensory observation for themselves, it is "filtered" as a description of someone else's experience:

Mary heard the bell ring. – The reader does not hear a bell, but is told that Mary heard it. Mary becomes a "filter" between the reader and the action.

The bell rang. – The reader hears the bell. The reader is in the scene "un-filtered".

In the above example the filter word is heard. In the OP the filter word is looked, although it's not as obvious because the viewer who is looking at the prince's face is inferred. Online articles will have more thorough examples.

Writers are encouraged to remove these common verbs – the "filter words" that trigger the distancing effect. A partial list is: to see,
to hear,
to think,
to touch,
to wonder,
to realize,
to watch,
to look,
to seem,
to feel (or feel like). In most cases these verbs (and the filtering character who has them) can be removed from the sentence, leaving a direct action that more viscerally involves the reader's own senses.

As with all writing tools, the idea is not to systematically remove all instances of these filter words, but to understand the unintended effect they are having on the reader.

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