When Are Your Words A Genuine Turkey?

And when are they actually a canary in the coal-mine?

Over on Threads a few months ago, writer David Gibson posted that he was struggling to remove ‘filter words’ in his work-in-progress - looked, gave, showed, saw, heard and more - and asked how others deal with them. Counting gave as a filter word was new to me - I think it must be about writing things like ‘she gave a shout’ instead of ‘she shouted’ - so that was interesting. And then I had a look at the comments.

• Someone suggested switching looked out for glanced, which is like dabbing calomine lotion on a single spot, when the child is full of scarlet fever.

• Someone else suggested getting hold of a book called 1000 Strong Verbs for Writers, because ‘it’s more maneagable than a thesaurus’. That’s more like browsing the shelves of the chemist choosing between available lotions, but although thesauruses/i unquestionably have their uses, it’s not going to make the least difference to the course of the illness.

• To my mind the most helpful comment was a suggestion to do a search for one of those filter words, and then ‘find a way to make something happen … Not “he heard a crash”, but “the lamp crashed to the floor”.’ We’re getting there: this sounds like single dose of antibiotic.