: Re: Do you use the word "that" too much? I find myself using the word "that" too much. How do you really know when you need that "that" word there? Like just now. I don't think I need

@Caterina108

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Have you ever come across a website called autocrit.com into whose web forms you surrender your latest draft so that the site may return a list of excessivenesses from your prose: things like, “You used six initial ing words. Try to remove at least four”? Or “You had only two instances of that and four of was/were. Good job!”

In one writing forum, the algorithm got reviews along the lines of “don’t believe what it tells you” and “AutoCrit will ruin your writing!” I never purchased the large-scale AutoCrit service, but I feel okay surmising that it was less a prose killer than a tool that took care of CTRL+F for you and offered a statistical reminder of the line that @sjohnston was talking about in an earlier answer, an indistinct line separating style from unmindful recurrences.

I think it’s a good thing you do, watching out for that the pronoun, that the conjunction, even that the adjective and adverb. With so many uses for the little tyke, it in particular needs an eye (or an ear) on its lookout (or soundout).

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