You have a writing tic. You even have several.
This isn’t an accusation, it’s a statistical certainty. Every author has them, including the ones you admire. The only difference between them and you is that they eventually learned to see their own.
And that’s exactly the problem: a tic, by definition, can’t be seen from the inside. It has become your natural breathing. You can reread a page ten times without noticing it, because your brain doesn’t read what’s written, it recognizes what it expected to find there.
Here are the five main ones, in the order they do the most damage. And above all, a method for hunting them down in your own writing.
1. The Adverb
It’s the most famous tic, and the most misunderstood.
Stephen King has a killer line about them that gets quoted everywhere: according to him, the road to hell is paved with adverbs. The trouble is that people turned it into an idiotic rule, namely that you should delete every single one. That’s not it.
The real problem with the adverb is that it’s almost always the symptom of a weak verb.
She closed the door violently.
She slammed the door.
The second is shorter, stronger, more vivid. The adverb wasn’t deleted: it was absorbed by the verb. That’s the move to make.
Worse still, the redundant adverb:
“Get out of here!” he shouted furiously.
The exclamation point says it. The verb “shouted” says it. The word “furiously” only repeats what we’ve already understood twice. It adds nothing, it slows things down.
The real culprit is elsewhere: dialogue-tag adverbs. He said softly, she replied curtly, he murmured sadly. Those give away one thing: you don’t trust your dialogue. If the line were good, we’d know the tone it was said in.
The test: delete the adverb. If the sentence loses meaning, keep it. If it loses nothing, it never should have been there. In eighty percent of cases, it loses nothing.
2. The Invisible Repetition
This one is insidious, because it’s not about the repetitions you can see.
You see the word repeated twice in the same sentence, obviously. You don’t see the word you use fourteen times per chapter because it’s part of your comfort vocabulary.
Every author has their crutch words. Mine was “gaze.” My characters spent their time exchanging gazes, lowering their gaze, feeling a gaze upon them. I never once saw it on its own. It took a reader pointing it out to me, with the tact of a surgeon.
Yours are elsewhere. Maybe “smile,” “sigh,” “feel,” “for a moment,” “slightly.” You have them, and you don’t see them, exactly the way I didn’t see mine.
Watch out for the opposite trap, though. The hunt for repetition breeds something worse than the disease: elegant variation. You know, that moment when a character becomes, one after another, “the young man,” “the blond one,” “the blacksmith’s son,” “our hero,” all in the same paragraph, just to avoid saying his name three times. The reader doesn’t find it elegant. He finds it tiresome, and he ends up losing track of who we’re even talking about. Repeating a first name isn’t a mistake. A first name is transparent, the eye glides right over it.
3. The Passive Voice
The door was opened by the guard.
The guard opened the door.
The second is shorter, more direct, and above all: it has a subject that acts. The passive voice hides the actor, slows the sentence, and puts distance between the reader and the action.
It isn’t forbidden. It’s even precious when the one who did the deed needs to stay in the shadows (The body was found at dawn, and it’s precisely the fact that we don’t know by whom that matters). But if you’re not using it on purpose, you’re using it too much.
4. The Never-Ending Sentence
The one that starts somewhere, that piles up subordinate clauses, that adds one detail, then another, that opens a parenthesis you won’t come out of unscathed, and that ends thirty words later in a place neither you nor the reader saw coming.
You just lived through one.
The problem isn’t length in itself. Long sentences are a magnificent instrument: they stretch time, they set a scene, they lull. The problem is uniformity. If all your sentences are long, the reader drowns. If they’re all short, he’s left breathless.
Rhythm is born from contrast. Three sweeping sentences, then one of four words. The reader jolts without knowing why.
The foolproof test: read it out loud. Wherever you run out of breath, you need to cut.
5. The Perception Verb (the Filter)
The most discreet, and probably the most costly.
She saw the body lying in the grass.
The body lay in the grass.
The first sentence sets up a camera between the reader and the scene. It says: here is someone who sees something. The second puts the reader directly in front of the body.
She saw, he heard, she felt, he noticed, she realized, he experienced. These verbs constantly remind the reader that he’s reading someone’s account, instead of letting him live the scene. Since we’re already inside the character’s head, there’s no point specifying that what he sees is seen by him.
Delete three quarters of them. You’ll lose nothing, and the scene will move a notch closer.
How to Spot Your Own
So much for the catalog. What remains is the real subject: how do you see what you can’t see?
Change the shape of the text. Print it. Change the font. Export it to EPUB and read it on an e-reader. Your brain stops recognizing, and starts reading again. It’s unsettlingly effective, and it costs nothing.
Read it out loud. The best tic detector there is, and it’s free. Your ear hears the repetitions your eye skips over, and your breath tells you where the sentences run too long. You’ll feel ridiculous. Do it anyway.
Make one pass per tic. Don’t hunt for everything at once, your attention gets diluted. A read-through that tracks only adverbs finds plenty of them. A general read-through finds none.
Use search. Ctrl+F for “ly,” and you’ll watch your adverbs pop up. Ctrl+F for your crutch words, once you know them.
And above all, get read by others. A tic, you can’t see it in your own work. You see it in other people’s in three seconds. That’s why beta readers are worth their weight in gold.
What I Ended Up Doing
This particular flaw is the direct origin of a feature in Le Grimoire. I couldn’t see my own tics, so I coded something that shows them to me. (The story behind the tool is behind the scenes.)
It’s called the Palette. One button, and the text lights up: each category takes on its color. The adverbs. The repetitions. The passive voice. The weak words. The overly long sentences.
But the point that matters isn’t there. It’s in the fact that you choose what you want to see.
Because a text where everything is highlighted at once is useless: it’s an unreadable Christmas tree, and you close the feature after thirty seconds. Whereas if you display only the adverbs, you see only them, and you see all of them. It’s exactly the single-pass method described above, except you no longer have to do it by hand.
One adverb pass. One repetition pass. One long-sentence pass. Each one hands you a different text to look at.
It’s not a proofreader. It doesn’t tell you it’s bad, it doesn’t rewrite anything, it doesn’t judge. It shows, and you decide. Because the choice stays yours: an adverb can be perfectly in its place, a forty-word sentence can be the most beautiful one in the chapter, and a repetition can be a deliberate effect.
What it gives you back is the fresh eye. It makes you see what you can no longer see in your own text. At a glance, you know whether this paragraph holds three adverbs or eleven.
Right-click opens the synonyms, without leaving the page, for the moments when the right word slips away. And the document language is set when you open it, so the correct dictionary gets loaded: which matters if you write in a language other than French, or if you switch back and forth.
One principle I won’t touch: the AI in Le Grimoire assists, it never writes in your place. It doesn’t correct your style, it shows it to you. The prose stays yours, tics and all, if you decide to keep them.
Le Grimoire runs locally on your machine. The trial is free, no strings attached.
To Close
A tic isn’t a moral failing. It’s simply a shortcut, a path your hand takes on its own because it has already taken it a thousand times.
The goal isn’t to eradicate them. A text with no adverbs, no repetitions, no long sentences, that’s not a text: it’s an exercise.
The goal is to choose. To know that you’re placing an adverb here, and why. To repeat this word because it has to come back, not because you didn’t have another one on hand.
The difference between a tic and a style is intention.