Tuesday Ten – Find/Replace Checklist for Submissions

‘ly’ – (‘He ran quickly.’ Your reader knows from the word ‘ran’ that it was quickly.)
‘Just’
‘ing’- (He was running = He ran.)
‘Pretty’ – (Pretty close = Close)
‘Started’ – (He started running = He ran)
‘That’ – IMHO, one of the most overused words in the English language. ‘He could tell that she was mad = He could tell she was mad.’
Time stamps, such as ‘minutes’, ‘hours’, etc. Don’t tell us time has passed, show it.
‘Very’ – same as pretty. (Very close = Close)
‘As if’ – Not something you need to replace every instance of, but a phrase I see overused in a lot of contemporary romance novels.
The dreaded ‘double space’. – Microsoft Word accommodates for spacing between sentences and has made the double space obsolete. I believe the change came with the 2007 version of Word, but you may want to double check.

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