And the Adverb winner is "Really"

Well I finally got to do some more serious editing today. My usual Monday writing day. Editing, Blog post, Twitter post, FB Author page post, ect.

I still need to edit another critique members chapters which I hope to work on next, but wanted to do this blog post while my memory was fresh on today's editing.

I received back Chapters 68 & 69 from my editor. Now that only means 4 more chapters to go! Yay. It also seemed these chapters had less to fix than some of my previous chapters back from her, so that was good to see too. All minor stuff really, but some glaring commonalities viewed.

While I was doing final review (which basically means I am reviewing her edits, accepting them which I usually do, then I copy and paste the revised chapter into my manuscript), I had also noticed Grammary was finding some mistakes as well. So I decided to go back a few chapters, and low and behold, there were more. I haven't been reviewing my last few chapters from her. Plus there were many older chapters that we or I did rewrites on that sometimes she didn't get to review again.

So this stirred me to go all the way back to the beginning and give it another run through with Grammarly (Can't say enough good things about Grammary, especially for a sucky grammar guy like me). Well it turns out there was a lot to fix and going through 370+ pages takes time! I started tracking the common mistakes I was making. Most common of course was the use of comma's and hyphenated words. Now that is common, still a bit frustrating considering that each chapters has had at least 4-5 previous edits, some as many as 13! But the real eye opener was my excessive use of adverbs in places where it didn't need one. Now sometimes I disagreed with Grammarly and kept an adverb, but in most cases it was right, and wasn't needed.

Here is my list of overly used adverbs and how many times I did it for each [Note as I mentioned before many more of these same adverbs were pulled out before during my critique or editor sessions, so to find this many still wants me to wack myself for doing it].

Here is the list...

1) The word "Really". I pulled out the use of this word 34 times!

2) Definitely. Pulled 21 out.

3) Own. Pulled 16 out.

4) Obviously. Pulled 11 out.

5) Clearly, Pulled 10 out.

5) Actually. Pulled 8 out.

Other adverbs pulled out; Absolutely, Basically, Possibly, Evidently, Apparently, Literally, and Totally, That last one I hate the fact I even used it. Makes me think surfer dude talk. "Hey dude, totally man." Hahahaha. My wife points out that these are all words I use in conversation, so that is why I continue making the mistake in my writing with them and don't catch them.

Of course overall this is good news, as I continue to polish my novel, and get ready to finish off the process with the Query and Synopsis. I believe I have found another editor who can do a full read-through to recheck my structure and flow to give my current editor a break who has been overloaded (and thus the time delays) and have a second view point which is always good. So I am looking forward to that. Now I just want to get back to my creative side and do more writing in my second book, not an easy task these days with all this to do along with a full time job averaging 60 hrs per week. But the final goal pushes me onward no matter and I look forward to the challenges as I continue to be a successful author! Cheers.