Department of Redundant Words Department

 

Above is a word cloud from my unedited first draft of last year's NaNoWriMo novel. The text size of a word reflects how often it's used in the novel (common words like "I" or "and" are excluded), so it makes sense that the biggest words are then names of my main characters. But look at the biggest word that isn't a name - that big orange one just under "Simon". Yes, it's the winner for "Cat's Most Unnecessarily Overused and Redundant Word" Award, "back"!

I did a count and in a 50,000-word story, I used "back" 218 times. I know without looking through the whole novel that at least 2/3 of the time my usage of "back" was completely unnecessary. Take these two sentences, for example:

Simon took back the egg then patted the side of the trailer. “Let’s get our friend here back to the house and then we can come back with the truck and get the rest of the eggs.”

Three "back"s in two sentences! And all but the last one can be removed without changing the nature of the sentence:

Simon took the egg then patted the side of the trailer. “Let’s get our friend here to the house and then we can come back with the truck and get the rest of the eggs.”

That last one could be tossed too if I just changed the wording a bit. Did you spot the other redundant word in that example? I'll give you a hint, it's one of the words on my growing Redundant Words List:

• About
• Actually
• Again
• Already
• Back
• Just
• Really
• Still
• Then
• Well

These are all words that I throw in without thinking in my rough drafts. Once I'm at the editing stage, I like to do a search for them in the document and take a look at each one to make sure each use is truly necessary. As I write more, I hope that I'll begin to catch myself writing "back" or "just" so I don't have to work so hard at editing them out!

Have you made a word cloud for your stories? Did they help you notice words you might overuse? What are some of your own redundant words?