Writing Tips: Looking Out for Filler Words. There are a variety of ways we can practice to minimize (or optimally eliminate) our use of filler words. — there are certain words you should delete to make the text stronger and cut your word count. If you don’t know what filter words are, you can’t avoid them. Some of the common filler words in English are um, uh, er, ah, like, okay, right, and you know . ‘Padding is unnecessary words or information used to make a piece of writing or a speech longer. All filter words (heard, smelled, taste, see, felt) were traded for active replacements. These terms pad out a sentence without adding anything meaningful, which can make your work harder to read. To be clear, filler words are not a big deal if they are infrequent in nature. When I’m writing a novel, one of my last drafts focuses on cutting these useless words. "A filler word is an apparently meaningless word, phrase, or sound that marks a pause or hesitation in speech. But powerful though this list is, it won’t work if you simply read it and move on. It creeps in all the time. Most listeners will expect a few um’s, and ah’s even in a formal presentation. Synonyms: waffle [informal , mainly British] , hot air [informal] , verbiage, wordiness’ In Business Writing. We all use them but knowing what they are can help when it comes to your second and third draft self-edits. My filler word is “just”. Also known as a pause filler or hesitation form . These writers limit their filler words when writing in first-person point of view in order to place the reader directly into the character’s shoes and limit the distance between the reader and POV character. The dreaded filler or filter words. When it comes to writing, though, we need to be more aware of them. Now that you’ve gone through the filler words list and have an idea of the most frequent offenders, it’s time to start making better use of that sentence real estate. Deleting unnecessary words will make your work cleaner and more polished. The last filler word on our list is often used during a long conversation or presentation in order to create a pause so the speaker can organize or gather his thoughts. Filler Words to Can From Your Copy. When you’re revising any piece of writing — a novel, a news article, a blog post, marketing copy, etc. Start with becoming familiar with some transitory words that can save you in times of great speech peril. Let’s review a partial list of filters and their close relatives. Eliminating Filler Words. Hopefully the links I’ve chosen today will help explain more about filler words and how avoiding them can improve your writing. Filler Words add no meaning to our language but they can keep the conversation going. The problem is that we often put these terms in our writing without thinking. If you want your writing to be concise, you need to look out for filler words. 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