Empty Words

This paragraph is taken from Get it in Gear, my ebook that contains my fiction-writing articles and advice for beginning writers.

These are words such as: very, even, ever, really, still, just.  In many cases, they have no individual meaning and only increase the word count.  In our real-world conversations, these words are used almost as punctuation marks and that usage carries over into our writing.  The test for an empty word is to remove it from the sentence and see if the meaning...