My writing group told me I use the word 'that' way too much, like 47 times in one chapter.

I went back and counted and they were right, I had 'that that' on the same page twice. Now I read every paragraph aloud before I hit send, has anyone else had a specific word ruin their flow?

2 comments

2 Comments

evanb8721d ago

47 times in one chapter? That's brutal but honestly that's me too. I read this thing once from Stephen King's 'On Writing' where he said the road to hell is paved with adverbs, but I think 'that' is even worse. Like you can delete half of them and the sentence still makes sense. I started a rule for myself that if I can take out 'that' and the sentence still works, I cut it. I had a paragraph about a character's house that had 'that' five times in three sentences and after I cleaned it up the whole thing just flowed way better. It's like a tic you don't notice until someone points it out.

the_reese20d ago

Honestly same here, I had to make a rule where I just ctrl+f 'that' and highlight every single one before I do edits. It forced me to see how often I was using it and now I catch myself mid sentence and rephrase. Took about a month of doing that before my brain finally learned to skip it naturally.