As writers, we can have what I call pet words and phrases.  These are words or phrases we tend to use more than we probably should. One of my big ones is the word “just.”  That guy can creep into my writing so easily that I will often find it three or four times in a single short story.  And like most adverbs, it is usually better omitted completely.

Here is how I tend to use it:

“He just felt it was time.”

“It was just the kind of thing she liked to do.”

“She was just over the speed limit.”

I think you can see in the first two examples how removing the word actually strengthens the sentence. There can be an argument for keeping the word in the third sentence, as it is a qualifier as to how much over the speed limit she was.

Other times you can have whole phrases that feel completely normal and natural to use but may be more specific to you than you think. I am reminded of a brother and sister I knew in college who would both use the term “Nanook of the North” to self-describe how they were bundled up in the winter. I am not sure if I have ever heard anyone else use that term, but I suspect it was rather common in their family growing up, so it came to feel ubiquitous to them.

The danger in using pet words and phrases is either coming off as repetitive or, in the case of Nanook, using a reference that may not be familiar to the reader.

While the use of AI is controversial and may go against market submission standards, it can be useful to help reveal your pet words. Here is a an example of a prompt I used with ChatGPT:

Review the following stories for “pet words” and phrases: words, expressions, sentence structures, or descriptions I use more often than I probably realize. Look for repetition both within individual stories and across the entire collection. Identify each repeated word or phrase, how often it appears, which stories it appears in, and a few representative examples. Explain whether the repetition seems distracting or acceptable, and briefly suggest ways to reduce or vary it. Rank the results from the most noticeable repetition to the least. Do not rewrite the stories.

I used it on my three stories I have in the archives on this site (Thin Red Lines, Our Shuttle Ride to See Aunt Della, and The Other Side of AI). I won’t post the elaborate results but here is what it summarized:

The three items I would place on your personal editing checklist are: search for “just,” inspect clusters of “like,” and watch for repeated “looked/turned” action beats.

The surprise for me is the “looked/turned” action beats comment. I didn’t realize I default to that so much.

Let me know in the comments below what pet words you find creeping into your stories.

-James