Mandy Lange asked M.D. Presley:

So I'm wondering, do you have a least favorite word?

M.D. Presley I believe "used" is supposed to be the least favorite word among males, but I've got nothing against it personally. However, in my writing world, "is" is verboten.

It's a carry over from screenwriting (and high school English) in that it's passive, which makes it not only bad writing when it shows up, but also an extraneous word that just eats up space on the page. Sentences like "he is running" therefore should never exist and quickly metamorph into the cleaner "he runs."

In high school English we were only allowed on "to be" verb per page, and while I'd like to stick to that in my adult prose, I have LOADS of "was" in my books despite my best intentions. In fact, I've never been so panicked as when, days before sending book two to the copy editor, I did a search for "was" and it came back with more than 900 hits. Sure, that only comes out to .7% of the total words in the novel, but it's still more than one per page and I was beside myself until I searched a best selling fantasy book to discover over 1,500 occurrences of "was."

Yeah, discovering that another used even more didn't make my writing any better. But it certainly made me feel better.

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