The Curse of Repetition...

can surely be a pain in the butt for many a writer..we were talking about repetition in our writers group at our last meeting and I was thinking about the time when I was going through a 'word repeat' edit on one of my novels and found a total of 49 'justs' 30 'likes' and 15 'saids'...there were other words on repeat but these were the main offenders, and try as I might I couldn't understand how in the blazes I hadn't picked it up going through the 5 or so previous edits!! The reason we were talking about repetitive words was because one of the members of the group found, in the 1st paragraph of the manuscript we were critiquing, the word 'over' five times. Talking about insignificant words like over often slipping through unseen by the writer, we were able to identify a few words that seem to remain on the write, repeat, write challenge for each of us. It was a great exercise to not only identify the sneaky offenders, but I found it really helpful to fess up and speak them out loud to the group cementing them in my memory, which I'm hoping will probably make me more aware of the excess use of these words as I continue to write.