On Writing- “Just” A Crutch

In a previous life, I was a radio announcer. Unlike writing, there is no editing process in live radio. The best on-air personalities prepare in advance, so they always know what’s next any time they open the microphone. Once that happens, there is no going back. You have to live with that instant of creativity. It means you spend time after the performance looking for ways to improve your work. Athletes and actors have the same pattern. Prepare, perform, review.

One thing they trained me to listen for on the “aircheck” tapes I would record several times a week were “verbal crutches”. (An aircheck only records what the announcer says, so a four-hour air shift becomes a forty-five minute recording.). Those crutches were words or phrases that repeat without a purpose. This differs from a slogan or a catchphrase which repeats to achieve a goal. A crutch is a word or phrase inserted without thought. It’s the announcer’s brain skipping ahead and sticking in stock blocks to fill the space.

Over the last year, I’ve made more use of editing software to improve my writing. What I discovered are writing “crutches”. The biggest of them all is the word “just”. It just seemed to appear just about everywhere. I just couldn’t seem to just write the sentences without it appearing just about every third sentence. (I am happy to say that I never wrote anything that awful. Pure exaggeration to make my point. But I used it a lot.)

In a five-hundred-word radio script or blog post, it could show up three or four times. If that was an occasional occurrence, it wouldn’t be a problem. What the software showed me was that it happened with appalling regularity. It was part of coming to grips with adverbs (a topic for another day) in my writing. But it led me to a deeper look at how I string words together. All writers create a “voice” by how they use language. Their choice of vocabulary, sentence structure, paragraph structure, storytelling style. Anything that helps you find that voice is a friend.

Today my software friends are Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and Hemingway.com. At first, I used them to catch punctuation and spelling errors with the side benefits of structure and grammar cues. My focus tends toward the larger story, which means I can glide over details. These applications bring the details to the fore. I give neither program absolute authority over what goes into a final draft. Instead, they offer recommendations for better, more consistent writing. Writing that lets my voice tell the story.

And they minimize the time I spend on crutches.

Peace