Overused Words in Fiction: How to Find Your Crutch Words and Fix Them

The overused words in most fiction drafts fall into five families: stock gestures (nodded, smiled, shrugged, sighed, turned, looked), intensifiers (very, really, just), hedges (seemed, almost), filter verbs (felt, saw, heard) and dialogue tags. To fix them, count each suspect per 10,000 words, read the worst scenes aloud, then give every instance one of four verdicts: keep, cut, replace or restructure.

That last step is where most advice goes wrong. A list of "words to never use" produces drafts where every character grimaces instead of smiling. The goal is not a smaller vocabulary of banned words. It is a draft where every common word is there because you chose it.

What makes a word a crutch

A crutch word is a word your draft uses by habit rather than by decision. Nothing is wrong with "nodded" in isolation. The trouble starts when it appears on every page because it fills a gap you didn't stop to think about: the moment between two lines of dialogue, the sentence that needed a stronger verb, the description you weren't sure about.

Crutch words are hard to see in your own work for a simple reason. You wrote them to be invisible. They are the words that let you keep drafting without stopping, which is useful in a first draft and a problem in the final one. Readers don't consciously count them, but they feel the sameness, and a sharp-eyed reviewer will quote it.

The families below cover most of what editors flag. Each has a different cause, so each needs a different test.

Your personal crutches may sit outside these families. Some writers lean on "suddenly" or "then" to move time forward; others start every third paragraph with "So." The method works the same way for any word.

Step 1: Find your crutch words

You need three passes, because each catches something the others miss.

Count them per 10,000 words

Raw counts are misleading. Forty uses of "just" in a 100,000-word novel is a different problem from forty in a 6,000-word chapter. Convert every count to a rate:

rate per 10,000 words = (count ÷ total words) × 10,000

Say your 92,000-word manuscript has 34 instances of "nodded." That is 34 ÷ 92,000 × 10,000, or about 3.7 per 10,000 words. The same calculation on a single 4,000-word chapter with 6 instances gives 15 per 10,000 words, four times the book's average, and that chapter is where you start.

Per-10,000 is also how published research reports word habits. In his book Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve, data journalist Ben Blatt counted -ly adverbs across thousands of books. In an excerpt on Literary Hub, he reports that the median fan-fiction author he sampled used 154 -ly adverbs per 10,000 words, while number-one New York Times bestsellers averaged 115 and literary award winners had a median of 114. Toni Morrison's rate of 76 came in below Hemingway's 80.

Treat those numbers as context, not targets. Blatt was counting one category of word, and a low adverb rate does not make a book good. NPR's review of the book reports a striking pattern among the authors of 37 "Great Books" he identified: 67% of their books with fewer than 50 adverbs per 10,000 words were considered great, against 16% of their books with more than 150. That is a correlation in one sample of famous writers, and it says nothing about cause. What it does show is that rate per 10,000 words is a sensible yardstick for comparing your chapters with each other.

Use a scanner on a chapter at a time

Searching word by word is slow. Paste a chapter into the scanner below and it counts the common crutch words for you, with each one linked to its page in the repetition library. The text never leaves your browser.

Work chapter by chapter rather than pasting the whole book. Crutch words cluster, and a chapter-level count shows you where the cluster is.

Read the worst scenes aloud

Counts miss proximity. Three "looked"s in a 4,000-word chapter is a low rate, but if all three are in one paragraph, a reader hears the echo. Reading aloud (or using your word processor's text-to-speech) catches repetition within a page that no rate will flag. Mark every word you hear twice before you reach the end of a page.

Step 2: Decide what each instance is doing

Once you have a list, resist find-and-replace. Every instance gets its own verdict, and there are only four.

• Keep it if it is the precise word and it is doing a job. "She nodded" is fine when the nod is an answer and there is no better way to give it.
• Cut it if the sentence means the same thing without it. Most intensifiers and many hedges fall here.
• Replace it if a more specific word exists. "Looked" can be "studied," "checked," or "glared," but only when the new word says something the old one didn't.
• Restructure the sentence or beat if the word is a symptom. A gesture that fills the gap between two lines of dialogue usually means the scene needs a different beat, not a different verb.

Replace is the verdict writers reach for first and the one that helps least. If you swap all forty "smiled"s for "grinned," "beamed" and "smirked," you now have forty smile-synonyms, and the reader still notices that everyone in your book smiles constantly.

Gestures: nodded, smiled, shrugged, sighed, turned, looked

Stock gestures are a common crutch in dialogue-heavy fiction. They exist because dialogue needs rhythm. Two characters trading lines with nothing between them can read like a script, so the drafting brain drops in a small physical action to break it up. The action is rarely chosen. It is the first motion that comes to mind, and the first motion that comes to mind is almost always a nod, a smile, a shrug, a sigh, a turn or a look.

Here is the diagnostic question for every gesture: does it tell the reader something the dialogue doesn't? A nod that agrees with a yes-or-no question adds nothing. A nod given while the character's hands keep shaking adds a great deal.

Nodded

Nodded usually means "agreed" or "acknowledged," and the dialogue often says so already. "'Fine,' she nodded" is a double signal. Keep a nod when it replaces speech entirely (a silent answer can be loud) or when the manner of it reveals something. Cut it when it sits next to a spoken yes.

Smiled

Smiled is the gesture that most often hides an unwritten emotion. Ask what kind of smile, and why. If you can answer, the answer is often better than the word: the character is relieved, or polite, or about to lie. If you can't answer, the smile probably isn't needed.

Shrugged and sighed

Shrugged and sighed are shorthand for indifference and frustration. Both work once in a while. When they recur, they usually signal that the character's attitude hasn't been built into what they say. A character who says "Whatever you want" doesn't also need to shrug.

Turned and looked

Turned and looked are blocking verbs: they move a character's body or attention so the next line makes sense. They are invisible in small numbers and mechanical in large ones. Often the fix is to delete them and let the next sentence show what the character sees. "She turned and looked at the door. It was open." becomes "The door was open."

When a scene is heavy with gestures, step back from individual words. Ask whether each character needs a beat at all, and whether one specific, characterful action could replace three generic ones. The rule of thumb is one beat that matters rather than three that don't.

Intensifiers: very, really, just

Intensifiers try to strengthen a word that wasn't strong enough on its own. Very is the classic case: "very tired" is a weaker phrase than "exhausted," and "very old" is weaker than a fact that proves age. Really does the same job with a more casual voice.

Just is the sneakiest of the three because it has several meanings: only, recently, exactly, simply, barely. In narration, most uses can be cut with no loss. In dialogue, "just" is often part of how a character speaks, and cutting every instance can make people sound stiff. Apply the verdicts to narration first and treat dialogue more gently.

Notice what happened in that rewrite. The goal wasn't to find a synonym for "very old." It was to replace a vague intensity with a concrete detail the reader can picture.

Hedges: seemed, almost, and their cousins

Hedges soften a statement. Seemed, almost, nearly, somewhat and maybe all say "this is roughly true." Sometimes that uncertainty belongs in the story: a point-of-view character can only guess what another person feels, so "he seemed angry" is honest.

Often, though, the hedge belongs to the writer rather than the character. "The room seemed cold" is a hedge if the room simply is cold. "She almost smiled" is fine once; three "almost"s in a chapter make every reaction feel half-committed. The test: is this uncertainty the character's, or mine? If it's yours, commit to the statement.

Filter verbs: felt, saw, heard (briefly)

Filter verbs put the act of perceiving between the reader and the thing perceived. "She heard the floorboard creak" filters; "The floorboard creaked" doesn't. Felt, saw and heard are the big three, with noticed and realized close behind.

They earn their place when the act of perceiving matters (she heard it, but nobody else did). Otherwise, removing the filter usually puts the reader deeper into the point of view. For close point of view in general, see our guide to point of view in fiction.

Dialogue tags: said, and everything instead of said

Said is the high-frequency word editors most often defend. Readers skim it, which is exactly what a tag should let them do. The crutch is usually the opposite habit: writers who avoid "said" and reach for "exclaimed," "retorted" and "hissed," often with an adverb attached.

Elmore Leonard put the case bluntly in rules later reprinted by The Guardian: "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue." His reasoning was that the line belongs to the character, and an ornate verb is the writer intruding. His next rule calls an adverb modifying "said" "a mortal sin."

You don't have to follow Leonard to the letter. "Whispered" and "asked" carry real information. But if your scanner shows a high count of exclaimed or replied, most of those can go back to "said," or disappear entirely when the speaker is obvious. Our guide to writing dialogue covers tags and beats in more depth.

Step 3: A one-hour crutch-word pass you can do this week

Here is the whole method as a single session. Do it after structural revision, never before; there is no point polishing sentences in a scene you may cut.

1. Pick one chapter, ideally the one a beta reader found slow or the one you rewrote most.
2. Paste it into the scanner and note the top five words by count.
3. Convert to a rate and compare against two other chapters. Anything at double your book's average is a target.
4. Search each target word in the chapter and give every instance a verdict: keep, cut, replace or restructure. Keep a tally; if fewer than a third of instances survive, you've found a true crutch.
5. Read the revised chapter aloud. Listen for new repetitions you created while replacing old ones.
6. Add your top crutches to a personal list and search for them during every future revision. Most writers have a few that follow them from book to book.

This pass sits inside a larger self-edit. If you haven't done the structural work yet, start with our self-editing guide, and when the scenes are in place, use the repetition library to look up alternatives and keep-or-cut guidance for any word the scanner flags.

Don't overcorrect

One last warning. A draft scrubbed of every "nodded," "just" and "said" can read stranger than the original, because readers now notice the effort. Common words are common because they work. The aim is a manuscript where none of them repeats so often that a reader hears it, and where each surviving instance passed a deliberate test.