Overused Words: Why and How to Avoid Them in Your Writing

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English language has 171,476 words. Given this huge number, it’s such a waste that many authors limit their writing vocabulary by reusing the same words over, and over, and over again. Overusing certain words, like interesting or awesome, in a piece of writing not only puts the reader to sleep, but leaves the author’s meaning vague and confusing.

This guide will address which words get commonly recycled, why this habit harms your writing, and how you can increase variety in your own writing.

Compare the two sentences below, and notice the difference in vocabulary:

Example one: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an interesting story about a doctor who makes a big, scary monster that feels lonely. The monster goes on a long, interesting journey because of his loneliness.
Example two: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein tells the chilling story of Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his creation of a companionless Monster, who becomes vengeful throughout the story due to society rejecting him.

While these two examples might share a similar basic idea, the second one avoids repeating words and favors specific words over general ones. The new words chilling, companionless, vengeful, and rejection allow the second example to paint a much stronger picture in the reader’s mind–and this is only one sentence. Imagine the difference that varied vocabulary can make throughout an entire paper, article, or story.

Commonly Overused Words

The following words, mostly adjectives, tend to get overused in writing:

• amazing
• awesome
• bad
• beautiful
• big
• funny
• good
• happy
• important
• interesting 
• know
• nice
• really
• sad
• said
• very
• walk
• weird
  

How Overusing Words Damages Writing

Recycling the same words harms your writing, no matter the audience or context: texting a friend about what happened at lunch, completing a school essay about Hamlet or the French Revolution, crafting a company-wide update about a new partnership, blogging about your latest muffin recipe, captioning an Instagram post about your Halloween plans… in each of these cases, overused words make the written text drier and more boring. Below, read more about how overused words do such damage.

Harm #1: Overused words make writing repetitive.

An audience doesn’t want to read the same words over and over again, because overused words suck the fun out of reading–they take sentences that should develop ideas and pop with energy, and reduce these sentences to basic information-relaying devices that don’t develop or grow throughout a text.

A food blog, for example, which intends to take readers on a journey through New York’s spicy world of Indian cuisine, should use unique words to describe every dish, flavor, and restaurant, to demonstrate their true originality. However, as shown below, describing each dish with the same words–flavorful, spicy, bright-colored, delicious, tasty–robs the text’s subjects of their distinctive qualities.

Food blog (with overused words): New York’s Indian cuisine scene is full of delicious food. Restaurants like Milon have Chicken Tandoori and vegetable fritters that are so tasty, visitors will absolutely enjoy them. Dhaba has Paneer Biryani that your taste buds will enjoy, and one of the best-tasting shrimp curries in the state.

Food blog (fresh language): New York’s food scene pulls from every country in the world, and nothing exemplifies this better than the city’s Indian Cuisine. Milon serves a crispy, buttery naan to accompany dishes that pop with flavor, like creamy Chicken Tandoori where the flavors mix together so well that not a single spice dominates the harmonious balance. Just down the road, Dhaba’s Paneer Biryani offers a cooler, more delicate flavor for those who prefer the spice toned down.

The second example’s word-swaps, more specific and vivid than those from the first example, make it so that every sentence brings novelty to the blog: a stronger sensory experience, a better awareness of what these restaurants are like, a more informative and entertaining experience for the reader.

Harm #2: Overused words make writing vague and unclear.

Good writing prioritizes clarity, because clarity allows writers to successfully express their unique and complex thoughts. For example, when Harper Lee describes how 8-year-old Jean-Louise (Scout) Finch feels, the word bad doesn’t really help the reader understand how Scout feels. However, if Lee describes Scout as feeling the tears welling up inside, or like all of her dreams crashed down around her, these specific descriptions help the reader imagine the feeling more concretely. 

Informational and analytical essays, like those written for school, also benefit from specific language, because all readers (including teachers and professors) want to have a novel, fresh reading experience. A student who can express their unique ideas with precision will hold the teacher’s attention, because readers want to gain new experiences, ideas, and thoughts from the texts they read. Check out the examples below to see how precise words help analytical writers share their nuanced thoughts about a text, leaving jaded analysis behind.

Literary analysis (overused words): Christopher McCandless, the main character in Into the Wild, goes on a wild adventure into Alaska because he wants to experience life. His suburban life seemed happy and normal to everyone around him, but he wanted more–he wanted adventure, to go out on his own and explore the world. Burning his credit card showed that he wanted to leave his previous life behind and experience something new.

Literary analysis (fresh language): Christopher McCandless, the main character in Into the Wild, decided to leave his seemingly pristine suburban life because he felt unsatisfied. Seeking a full life, with the insecurity and absolute freedom from which his home environment protected him, he journeyed down to Mexico and up to Alaska with just a backpack.

By avoiding the overuse of general words to describe a character, theme, or idea–in this case, the words adventure, life, and experience–writers push themselves to move away from abstract, all-inclusive words, toward more concrete ones, like unsatisfied, freedom, and insecurity.

Specific, varied, and concrete words increase the chances of a reader knowing just what the writer attempts to say, a huge plus in academic writing.

Strategies to Avoid Word Overuse

Whether you’re just beginning a piece of writing and want to keep things fresh from beginning to end, or if you’re in the process of revising your latest blog and noticed that it uses the word interesting too many times, fret not: the tricks below can help spice up your language, no matter where you sit in the writing process.

Strategy #1: Determine which words you commonly overuse, and find them in your writing [Ctrl+F].

If you notice that certain words, such as important or interesting, get commonly recycled in your writing, try using the find-text tool [Ctrl+F] once you’ve drafted the document or a paragraph, entering the word into the search bar, to scan your text for the overused culprit and identify how many times it pops up. It might surprise you how often certain culprits make repeat appearances. 

Once you’ve identified overused words in your writing, implement the below strategies to substitute new-and-improved words.

Strategy #2: Consult a thesaurus.

Thesauruses exist for just this purpose: to help writers find the perfect word to replace the preexisting one. In the example pairs below, the overused (tired) example features the word bad.

Searching the word bad in the Merriam-Webster thesaurus website or app, presents an array of precise words that, when used in place of bad, add color and detail to the rejuvenated sentences.

Tired literary analysis: In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov feels bad that he murdered a woman.
Rejuvenated literary analysis: In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov feels rotten with anxiety about the fact that he murdered a woman.

Tired science report: Radiation has bad effects on an organism.
Rejuvenated science report: Radiation has destructive effects on an organism.

Tired description in a story: The woman noticed the bouquet of flowers on the desk and thought it looked bad.
Rejuvenated description: The woman noticed the bouquet of flowers on the desk and thought it looked awkward.

Note that the rejuvenated examples provide the reader more information, and in each of these cases the new, specific word paints a much clearer picture for the sentence as a whole.

Strategy #3: Select the most precise word possible.

Overused words are usually vague, offering the opportunity to replace them with a more-specific word that creates a stronger sentence. The precise replacement-word is not always a direct synonym for the original word. For example, a writer could replace the sentence I feel amazing with I feel energized or I feel confident. Even though energized and confident don’t mean the same thing as amazing, they paint a clearer picture and a more effective sentence due to their increased specificity.

This strategy helps refine our language and ideas, making them unique and original. The below examples demonstrate how swapping a word for its more-precise counterpart can boost a sentence.

Tired language: Romeo and Juliet tells the exciting story of two young lovers who fight their circumstances to remain together.
Specified language: Romeo and Juliet tells the heart-wrenching story of two young lovers who fight their circumstances to remain together.

Tired language: Sunlight plays an important role in helping plants grow.
Specified language: Sunlight plays a fundamental role in helping plants grow.

Tired language: The backyard’s willow trees and calm stream made a beautiful scene.
Specified language: The backyard’s willow trees and calm stream made a harmonious scene.

When a writer chooses particular words for each sentence, refusing to lazily settle for overused and vague words, suddenly each new sentence in the text builds productivity upon the ones before it. 

Strategy #4: When in doubt, cut the intensifiers.

Intensifying words–like very, really, incredibly, so, totally, and absolutely–usually act as fluff. Put differently, intensifiers often take up space in our writing but fail to serve a purpose. Further, writers often use these words without thinking and don’t realize how much they pile up throughout a text.

Unnecessary words cause a text to drag on, and a sentence usually loses nothing without them–on the contrary, sentences usually become stronger without intensifying words because the core ideas, subjects, actions, and descriptions can take center stage without a wasteful word-crowd around them.

Rather than using an intensifier to add vividness to a jaded, general word, try using a more exciting or specific word in the first place. Often, this means that you’ll swap out both the intensifier and the verb it intensifies, replacing them with a single engaging word, as in the examples below:

Unnecessary intensifier: Atticus Finch takes a very big risk when he decides to defend Tom Robinson in court.
Specific word swapped in: Atticus Finch takes an unprecedented risk when he decides to defend Tom Robinson.

Unnecessary intensifier: The Nile River played a really important role in ancient Egyptian society.
Specific word swapped in: The Nile River played a foundational role in ancient Egyptian society.

Unnecessary intensifier: Wagging his tail, the puppy became so happy when they arrived at the park.
Specific word swapped in: Wagging his tail, the puppy became ecstatic when they arrived at the park.

Using fewer words, but more carefully chosen ones, maximizes specificity and meaning, leading each word to provide more impact.

Quick Swaps for Overused Words

Each overused word has hundreds of possible specific-substitutes and related words–more word swaps than any thesaurus could provide; taking the word beautiful for example, both  hypnotizing and otherworldly could serve as related substitutes, but these have different-enough definitions from beautiful that neither would get listed in a thesaurus. Often, finding just the right word depends on your internal vocabulary, which is why frequent reading provides the background for good writing.

Still, when you feel stuck on a tired word and can’t figure out a substitute, it helps to have a bank of ideas. Check out the chart below for some go-to swaps:

Wrapping up

We all do it–we all overuse certain words, and most of the time we don’t even notice that we do it. It’s very well possible that despite my careful proofreading of this article, I’ve overused certain words within these very sections. So as always, we writers must adopt a learner’s mindset: We must strive to improve and freshen our stale language whenever we notice it. Reading and writing provide valuable practices to help us become better writers in the long run, so when we practice those as much as possible, the rest takes care of itself. Here’s to growing as writers, and freshening up our language along the way.