Since I'm on Spring Break this week (YAY), I thought it would be fun to hear from our lovely readers. We all have writing tics that annoy us--our pet peeves. And we all have writing tics of our own.
So, share in the comments! Tell us the writing tic that drives you nuts, and, if you know it, the writing tic you just can't get rid of no matter how hard you try.
Here's mine:
*This one doesn't drive me nuts so much as make me laugh because the result is usually humorous. But I have been noticing a lot of incorrect modifiers lately. So much so that I wrote a blogpost about it. An example:
Closing the door, my eyes tracked across the room.
LOL--those are some powerful eyes. :)
*I'm sure my critique partners could come up with more, but I know I have an over-fondness of the words "just" and "that." *sigh*
Okay, let's hear yours! And happy Wednesday!
Tick in other's writing: repetitive descriptions. It's a common thing for authors to fall into, also an easy on to fix. Do a document search and change some of them
ReplyDeleteTick in my writing: I constantly transpose me and my o_O
I overuse "that" and "like." I do it in my speech too, so it's not surprising. It bugs me when authors (from the US) use the word "towards" instead of "toward."
ReplyDeleteI'm annoyed when I read a first person narrative that sounds like third. "My cell phone jerked away from my ear and fell to the floor." It sounds mechanical, like the narrator didn't perform the action. This isn't some paranormal story and what the narrator meant was that "I jerked the cell phone away from my ear and dropped it to the floor."
ReplyDeleteThat is also a huge problem for me. But I have many words I overuse.
I get annoyed when people say 'he said' about twenty times, when the reader clearly knows who is speaking. Though it might be worse when they start rifling through the dictionary for said replacements and use them ove rand over.
ReplyDeleteFor me, I apparently switch tenses a lot. That's definitely a problem.