Search-and-Destroy
I wrote my first novel on a typewriter, and one of my most vivid memories of that is proofreading the final submission draft and trying to decide, over and over, whether it was worth retyping a whole page in order to get rid of one too-common word or phrase. Mostly, it wasn't.
When I got my first word-processor, I was immensely pleased by the way it let me go back and tidy up at the last minute. The "search and replace" function was especially helpful for getting rid of words and phrases that I'd overused. The only catch was, I had to know which words I was overusing, in order to search for them.
Over the years, I've developed a search-and-destroy list of words and phrases that creep into my rough drafts no matter how hard I try to avoid them. Some are things I've noticed; some are things my first-readers have called to my attention enough times that I have to reluctantly admit that what I think of as a charming or evocative phrase has been overworked, to say the least. The list changes a little from book to book, and from viewpoint character to viewpoint character. Daystar had a terrible tendency to overuse "really" (and we won't even talk about the semi-colons); Eff doesn't have a problem with "really," but I have to watch that she doesn't overuse "a mite" and her sentences sometimes go on for whole paragraphs and need some breaking up.
One of the things I've noticed recently is that "search and destroy" is really the wrong name for that list. The words and phrases on it aren't things that always have to disappear; they're things that need an extra look. About 80% of the time, I don't need them, but the other 20% of the time, they're exactly right. For instance, the sentence "She seemed to be able to see a lot more from the high window" is a lot stronger and shorter as "She could see a lot more from the high window" (both "seemed to" and "be able to" are fairly high up on my search-and-destroy list; in combination they're an instant kill).
On the other hand, the sentence "Even if he chose not to answer some questions, she would be able to tell a lot by which questions he refused." is more ambiguous; here, the choice to change "she would be able to tell a lot" to "she could tell a lot" is as much a matter of voice as it is of over-use. I'd probably change it in most cases, but if I hadn't used the phrase in a while (a couple of chapters, say) and my viewpoint character tended to be pedantic, I might very well leave it alone. And the sentence "He wondered if he would be able to swim all the way to the far side of the river" is almost certainly going to remain unchanged, because "he wondered if he could" probably isn't going to imply enough self-doubt for what I want there.
The other thing I noticed is that "destroy" isn't exactly accurate, either. At least half the time, I don't just delete an overused word or phrase. Instead, I replace it with something else. "Would be able to see" often becomes "could see," or even just "saw." "Very red" sometimes becomes "crimson" or "scarlet," if the character's voice allows it. Sometimes it doesn't; one of my characters prefers similes such as "as red as my grandmother's cranberry sauce" to terms like crimson or scarlet, so that's what I change it to for her.
The point, as always, isn't really to come up with a list of forbidden words (which won't be the same for every writer anyway). The point is to make the writing more effective by looking at the standard words and phrases the writer comes up with by default, and then making a conscious decision whether to look for a clearer or more vivid or more succinct way to say the same thing.
