Whichever process you use to write, thoughtful planning or making it up as you go, your rewrite will call for thoroughness. At any stage in your glorious creation, as much as your work is the product of the workings of your beautiful mind, that product will also be vulnerable to its ingrained habits. Your job is to break those patterns and add variety to the voice that comes through your characters.
With all due repsect your uniqueness and that of your creations, please do your best to eliminate annoying stupidities from your mind, your speech and your work. Make yourself not use the phrase "for future reference". You can only refer to something in the future, so there can be no other timeframe for it. Whenever I hear that idiot phrase used, I think more about it than whatever point the speaker was trying to make and how it probably couldn't be that important anyway if the person is saying things like "for future reference".
I would love to never again hear the phrase "close personal friend". Whether the speaker is just trying to add words or, more likely, sound more important, it just sounds stupid. I would rather hear fingernails being dragged across a chalkboard (officially ranked as the most annoying sound to human ears) than ever hear that phrase again. Do you have any friends who aren't personal? I don't. Of course, my friends are my friends. Your friends are yours. There must be editors out there who are likewise being driven to madness such ridiculous use of adjectives.
For the sake of those editors, I'll mention that there's no such word as "eckcetera" and it isn't abbreviated "ect". The word you want is "etcetera" and it's abbreviated "etc".
It feels good to get that out. Anyone else have any common malaproisms or malignings of thought and word that set you off? Let's hear about it.
Thanks for stopping by.
Phoenix
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