I meant to post a weekly round-up post on Sunday, but real life intervened.
My reading has been very slow lately, and I still have a couple of reviews to write from books I finished two weeks ago.
Thankfully, I am making progress with my revisions. My current task is reading through my first draft and checking for continuity errors and typos, and figuring out which scenes need to be added or cut.
I’ve compiled a list of words and phrases which I used too often. My characters constantly wince, shrug, nod, grin, and look grimly determined. To my horror, I’ve caught them grimacing on a couple of occasions. I’m allergic to that word after I read an historical mystery in which the heroine grimaced on every page. It seemed to be her only expression.
The silliest mistake was having my characters eat desert instead of dessert. Unfortunately, this typo occurred in the pages I’ve already sent in to a contest and which I’d read over about a million times looking for such mistakes. Ouch!
The funniest error was the line in which one character describes another as a “supercilious scoundrel”. I was confused when I saw it as I have no memory of writing it. It doesn’t fit the character at all. I was wondering about this out loud when my son suddenly started acting out a scene from the Disney film The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh in which Gopher is complaining about Rabbit and says: “That supercilious scoundrel confiscated my honey.” I guess that DVD must have been on in the background when I wrote that line. 
For a while, it seemed as if all romance heroes had to drawl sardonically at some point in the book. Fortunately, this practice has gone the way of the dodo. I’m almost tempted to squeeze it in at some point in my book, just for the laugh.
Which words or phrases do you overuse, either in speech or in writing? Which ones annoy you when you’re reading?
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I recently did a monster re-read of all of Judith McNaught’s books. Her heroes are *constantly* roaring. They roar with laughter, they roar during sex, they roar in anger. Seriously.
Also, she might have been the originator of the feisty heroine hair toss. This is how we know she’s sassy and doesn’t take any crap. She tosses her hair. I’m surprised she doesn’t have brain damage from all the tossing.
No seriously, I love McNaught. But re-reading a bunch of her books in a row made plenty of her writerly “ticks” much more apparent to me.
I’m terrified of this problem — and it’s not just overused verbs & adverbs, I worry even about punctuation. I did a global search in my WIP recently for exclamation points (!!) (those are for ironic emphasis, not because I worry your readers don’t know what an exclamation point looks like) (btw) (!). Luckily, there did not seem to be too many of them, and I was able to justify the ones that are in there.
So now my paranoia is that there is a Highly Annoying Word or Phrase (HAWOP) in my WIP and I can’t see it. A HAWOP has only to appear twice to be Highly Annoying, and if I were the reader, I would be Highly Annoyed, but as the writer . . .
(This isn’t actually keeping me awake nights, but I do worry.)
My overused words CHANGE. So if I root out a few, more take their place.
When I write (caveat being I do not write fiction), I tend to overuse words like suddenly and very. When I am writing historiographical analysis stuff, however is my fave word. I *always* have to check how many times I use it.
I overuse posit, asseverate, and effluvia just because
I have noticed, when reading series that some authors do tend to discover a word and over use it. One erotic romance was rife with people stroking their tumescence. And yet another had creamy-ness all over the place (I was beginning to wonder if they heroine was Boston cream doughnut).
Most overused word would be “Fuckwit” (but it is so often so appropriate). The most annoying phrase in the world is “kitty corner”. Makes me want to scratch somebody’s eyes out. Of course, for me, the most irritating book of modern times is ‘Eat Pray Love’ and now it’s going to be a movie and (sweet lamb of god) a set of 3 fragrances. Is there no end to this awful woman (Elizabeth Gilbert) and her awful book?
I know I use awesome way too much. There’s probably a lot of other phrases, too. But that what editing’s for, right?
I’m sure once it’s finished it will be brilliant.
@Kati: Authors do tend to have pet words and phrases. That’s fine as long as they aren’t ones which yank a reader out of the story. I think all that roaring would annoy me!
@Magdalen: I need to ADD exclamation points!!!! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Seriously, I was so strict with myself on not using them that I failed to use them when I should have.
@Victoria Janssen: My overused words CHANGE. So if I root out a few, more take their place.
That is scary. I’m sure the same will happen to me.
@Dhympna: At least your overused words are more interesting than mine!
@Trish: Fuckwit is an excellent word. Anyone who objects to it, is one.
@heidenkind: I can deal with awesome. “Like” drives me insane.