Or, as I like to call it, Advanced Show Don’t Tell.

It will be difficult to eradicate every instance of these words from your manuscript, but you’ll find if you do a search on them (two or three times) you can eliminate a high percentage of them and provide stronger description of what’s happening on the page.

• feel
• felt
• think
• thought
• LY words
• ING words
• smile – a lot of times words like smile and laugh are implied by dialogue or action and don’t need to be included
• laugh
• grin
• frown
• gaze
• stare
• very
• seem
• really
• great
• looked
• swear words – usually there is a better way to describe a character’s emotion through action

Reduce the frequency of the above words and you’ll find your manuscript to be 100% stronger.

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