People who know me know this: I don't see the forest for the trees. I don’t read stories. I read words. I read lots of words strung together. Yes, I know the words have meaning, and I see the meaning, but what many people fail to realize is that a forest is made up of trees. And if enough of those trees—or words—are rotten or ill-chosen, it makes the entire forest look rotten.

For this reason, I analyze prose to death. I am far from an expert (if I wrote good prose, I probably wouldn't care so much about it), but I am an attentive observer, and these are things I notice-- I’ve made them, my friends have made them, published authors who shouldn’t have been published have made them (ever read a book and thought ‘gee, he doesn’t sound like he knows what he’s doing’?), and people on the various writing sites I belong to have made them. No one mistake is specific to anyone, but I hope if I draw enough attention I can destroy most of these once and for all, at least in the fiction of those who read this and care.

The Mistakes, listed in the Very Important Order of As I Think of Them:

1. Too Many Prepositions. ‘Too many’ being the operative words here, since of course prepositions are needed. It’s just that they aren’t always needed where they’re put. For example, in stuff I wrote when I was younger, and frequently in a story I once beta-read, characters did not walk, they ‘walked forwards’. It seems this is to assure the reader they are not walking backwards.

A similar problem is too many prepositions in one sentence: ‘They walked forwards towards the girl sitting under the tree.’ It’s not a bad sentence, but the frequency of prepositions in it gives it an odd rhythm. Similarily, ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ also has a rhythm, in the way each noun has an adjective (or two) describing it. Try to avoid this, or your readers will find themselves nodding their head or tapping a foot as they read in time to a beat they don’t consciously notice.

2. Quantifiers. Phrases like ‘a few’, ‘every so often’, ‘once in a while’, ‘a couple of,’ and ‘occasionally’ suggest that a specific number isn’t really needed, therefore making the circumstances sound unimportant. ‘Every so often I saw a guy’s head being ripped off,’ nothing special or noteworthy, right?

3. ‘At random’. In a real, published book (Robert Newcomb’s ‘The Fifth Sorceress’) I found the sentence ‘severed limbs were scattered at random’. This sentence is disturbing not only because of its semantic content, nor the redundancy of ‘scattered’ and ‘at random’, but because of the inference that somehow, somewhere, there are severed limbs being scattered deliberately and methodically.

4. The –ing Mistake. Words ending with –ing occur simultaneous to the action in the rest of the sentence. ‘Running up the stairs, she opened the door’ is an impossibility. You can’t open a door while running up the stairs.

5. The Wrong Word. Not just ‘your/you’re’ or ‘to/too/two’ but ‘then/than’, ‘allusion/illusion’, and ‘affect/effect’. And many others, too many to list.

6. Political Campaign Words. Or Courtroom words. Or words that you’d hear at the Geneva convention. Any word that is overformalized or too modern or ‘politically correct’ for the situation. Often occurs in fantasy. Examples: ‘civil rights’, ‘trauma’, ‘assertive’, ‘authoritarian’, ‘special needs’, the concept of ‘war crimes’, ‘on a regular basis’.

6.5 ‘Eye of Argon’ Words. Named after the truly horrible fantasy story read at Sci Fi conventions as a game, with the person who reads longest before collasping with laughter the winner. Examples: wench, steed, the word ‘lustily’ in any context, thrust, ferocious, lest (instead of 'unless').

7. Flat Description. By this I mean ‘She had red hair and wore a red dress.’ This does not mean you have to work description into action, but you should make description active and flavorful. ‘Red hair flowed to her shoulders.’ ‘She bowed in a ripple of red silk.’ ‘Her smile was wide and toothier than he had expected.’

8. Revealing Character Traits with Adjectives and Adverbs. ‘He laughed manically’. ‘She smiled evilly.’ Pretty self-explanatory. Don’t spoon-feed character development to your readers, especially extreme ones like those listed here in single words. If someone is truly manic or evil (and they're not the same thing), this should be shown to the reader through many manic or evil actions, not through adverbs.

9. ‘Said-bookisms’ have been discussed often enough. Just use the word ‘said’, or ‘asked’ if they’re asking a question. Avoid adding adverbs unless they add something not immediately obvious, like if someone is being sarcastic. Avoid synonyms for said unless they are more accurate and not distracting.

10. ‘Then’ or ‘After That’ as Transitions. These make it sound as if your character is following directions in a recipe or crossing out items on a to-do list.

11. Relying On A Cliché To Do Your Description. ‘They entered the haunted mansion’. This simply does not do. Tell us what the haunted mansion looks like, even if you have to repeat the occasional cliché to do it—but don’t just have the reader pull up a mental file on ‘haunted house’ and use that as the setting of your story. Make things different enough that your typical ‘haunted house’ won’t fit.

12. Exclamation Points! They can be used in dialog. Otherwise, they don’t make the reader feel excited, they make you sound sugar-high.

13. Characters Who Sound Like Stupid Teenagers. Even if they are stupid teenagers, it is annoying. Have a higher breed of protagonist.

13.5 Characters Who Sound Like Narrators. ‘He looked at me in utter shock’ might be okay in from a first-person POV, but it should never be used in dialog. Real people don’t speak like that.

14. Using 40 words when 10 ones will do. Or even cheaper. Only use a thesaurus if 1. You’d repeat a word otherwise or 2. The word you have isn’t completely accurate, and you can’t think of a better one off the top of your head.

15. Words like ‘just’, ‘even’ or ‘almost’ when used like ‘He just stood there’ (‘he stood there’ is good enough, ‘he only stood there’ or ‘he simply stood there’ sound more serious and less like teenagers), ‘he couldn’t even remember the page number’ (‘even’ if overquantifying it and, as I have been informed, sounds both teenagerish and amateurish), or ‘she stood up almost quickly’ (what is ‘almost quickly’? Average speed? If someone isn’t doing the action completely or doing it completely the way you’re describing it, find another word).

There you go. Just try removing these fifteen mistakes from your writing (oh dear, I seem to have used a 'just'. Is it justified?(1)), and it will be that much better. I promise.

(1)Well, I said nothing about puns.