Young Writers Society

I try to avoid down and up as in 'she was up in her room'. 'she was in her room' flows better.

-That
-Had
-Use adverbs sparingly
-Then
-as
-suddenly
-contiguous prepositions, especially over and back
-all cliches
-i could ____(i could see the puppy sounds bogus)
-ing words
-was and were + ing words
-because
-but

THAT

urgh
shoot me now please. Okay once or twice is fine but it's amazing how many stories on here and others i have read which have 'that' in them, when it is not needed. Horrible horrible horrible.

Delete it.

the fact that the sheriff was shot with a machine gun was unusual (bad example haha)
Delete 'that' and wow the sentence is so much better!

My number one most hated word ever

"awesome".

it's okay if your character says, "That's awesome!"
but i absolutley hate it when this happens, "The monster rose with awesome power."
It sounds STUPID. i physically cringe every single time i hear that.

'just'.
Trust me, most of the times I see it, I advise the author to delete it.
'So' as in 'So, as they were walking....'
Seriously. I haven't seen one time where starting a sentence with 'so' (outside of dialogue) was good.