Confront Weasel Words

As frequent readers know, I am working on revisions right now. I just sat down again with my revision checklist and realized that there is a section that might benefit a lot of people, which is my personal list of weasel words. 

I’m not quite sure who or when I started calling these weasel words, I’m fairly sure it is a concept I’ve been using since AP English. This is one of those tools that stretches to any type of writing whether it is fiction, an essay, or a social media post. 

Weasel words are words that sap your sentences of conviction. They either make you sound uncertain or they do not give enough detail about what they describe. The list of weasel words is long, and when you start to notice them, you will see them everywhere. Matt Bell tells a story in his article on weasel words that he found over 800 instances of the word “that” in his novel, a full four pages! 

Eliminating weasel words streamlines your text. One on its own is not a problem, and you will not be able to eliminate them completely. I aim to remove about 90% of them from my final text. To me it makes the text instantly sound more polished and it forces me to deepen my descriptions by being more specific. But this is a style choice. Whether you use more or less of these words will change the feeling of your writing. And your unique list of words and how you handle them will be different from mine. So use with caution, but do give it a try and notice what you like (or don't like) about the change.

Here's how I go about using this list: As a finishing step, after you have finished your overall revisions, use the search function on your word processor to find each instance of these words in your manuscript. Do not just delete them using find and replace, you’ll introduce more errors that way (guess how I know!). Instead, use find and replace to highlight every instance in a document and then read each sentence and see if you can reword to remove it. Often the only thing you will need to delete is the word itself, but sometimes you’ll need to write a more specific description to eliminate it. Words like “wonder” or “know” and “understand” are places to put in more character voice.

A last note: You’ll notice that “said” is not on this list. Said is a special case in that in fiction it is an invisible word. There is no need to replace it with lots of variations which tire the reader out over time. And eliminating it entirely can confuse your reader as to who is talking. If it does bug you and you decide to remove it, take extra care to check that your dialogue is clear. 

Here's the list, happy hunting! 

that, expected, actually, walk, move, may might, could, can be, up to, helps, as much as, maybe, a bit, sort of, somewhat, kind of, possibly, probably, some, many, as well as, amazing, awesome, good, important, nice, interesting, honestly, essentially, due to, basically, finally, suddenly, always, sometimes, again, really, even, still, like, something, anything, everything, thing, mostly, almost, surely, perhaps, at last, quite, then, and then, of them, of the, once, else, just, merely, seem, large, huge, big, wide, great, long, massive, giant, enormous, vast, tiny, small, little, hard, soft, weak, thick, thin, strong, strange, weird, think, understand, wonder, know, find, very, every, grin, smile, shrug, nod, look, see, watch

A Final Note: A good chunk of this list comes from Matt Bell’s article, and some are my own additions. Some are unique to my writing. You might have your own so I suggest building your own list over time as you notice your own usage. My friend Lancelot has an excellent article on using regular expressions to search for your most commonly used words that might be helpful as well.

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Image Credit: Via Library of Congress: Bull, Charles Livingston, Artist. Weasel and Humming Bird. , None. [Between 1890 and 1932] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2010715251/. Image is cropped and converted to black and white.