Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

If you want your story to fly off the page – then it’s all in the editing.

Once you have a near finished draft, it’s important to go through it and cut any unnecessary words. I use Mircosoft Word ‘Navigation’ – CTL ‘F’ key. It’s brilliant. You type in a word and it will tell you how many times you’ve used it, shows you page numbers and allows you to navigate easily between these sentences to fix them.

I have a list I work through. It started when my Beta readers commented that I used certain words and phrases too often – everyone grinned (mostly inappropriately!), there were lots of smiles flashing and a few too many calming breaths! There are plenty more, but I don’t want to embarrass myself too much.

We all have our own pet words to search for and destroy, but here’s a list of a few that are universal.

ly words…