You can't find overused words by rereading your own book. By chapter twelve, your eyes slide over the same gestures and stock phrases because you wrote them and you know what they mean. Your beta readers, meanwhile, are quietly counting how many times everyone smiled, nodded, sighed and shrugged. This article covers how to surface those habits across a whole novel, using Prose Check and the Echo Report in Pendrilo Studio, and how to decide which ones deserve a fix.
Why the habits hide until the whole book is on the table
A single "she nodded" is invisible. Three in one scene is a nudge. Two hundred across a full manuscript is a pattern, and no one notices it while drafting because each instance is perfectly reasonable where it sits.
Most overused words fall into a few families:
- Beat gestures: smiled, nodded, shrugged, sighed, grinned, frowned.
- Filler words: just, really, very, quite, suddenly, actually.
- Hedges and padding: started to, began to, seemed to, a bit of, in order to.
- Personal pets: a word or image you love and have used far more than you realize. Everyone has a few.
These aren't mistakes. They're defaults your hands reach for when you're moving fast. The goal isn't to purge them. It's to know where they cluster so you can make deliberate choices.
Run Prose Check to find overused words and filler habits
Prose Check in Studio looks at four kinds of things: filler words, wordy phrases, weak verbs and repeats. It's most useful when you treat each one as a different question about the same text.
Filler words
This is the "just" and "really" sweep. Filler words usually weaken a sentence slightly without changing its meaning. "She just wanted to leave" and "She wanted to leave" say the same thing, and the second is cleaner. But dialogue is different: people do say "just" and "really" out loud, and stripping every one makes characters sound like press releases. Read each hit in context before you cut.
Wordy phrases
"In order to," "the fact that," "at this point in time," "was able to." These are longer ways of saying shorter things. Wordy phrases tend to pile up in narration when you're explaining rather than showing, and they're the easiest wins in a revision because the tighter version almost never loses anything.
Weak verbs
Weak verbs aren't banned verbs. "Was" and "had" are fine most of the time. What you're hunting for is a stretch where every sentence leans on "was walking," "was standing," "was looking." When a paragraph reads flat and you can't say why, a quick look at the verbs often explains it.
Repeats
Repeats are the same word or phrase showing up close together. A repeated word two sentences apart usually reads as an accident. Sometimes it's a fix as simple as a different verb or a merged sentence. Sometimes it's deliberate, like a refrain in a tense scene, and you leave it.
Start with a chapter you already suspect is rough, not the whole book. You'll learn what your own patterns look like at a manageable scale before you face the full list.
Zoom out with the book-wide Echo Report
Prose Check works at the level of the page. The Echo Report is for the level above that: repeats across the whole book. That's where "smiled" and "nodded" finally show up with real weight, because the question changes from "did I use this twice in a paragraph?" to "is this how I solve every dialogue beat for 300 pages?"
Here's a practical way to work through it:
- Finish drafting first. Don't run it on a half-written book and tidy as you go. You'll fix words you'd have cut anyway.
- Scan for your top offenders. Note the five or six words that surprise you most. Ignore character names, place names and necessary terms. A fantasy novel will rightly repeat "sword."
- Check where they cluster. Thirty uses spread evenly is a different problem from thirty uses crammed into three chapters written during a rushed week.
- Pick a target per word. "Smiled" might become something you use maybe a dozen times for moments that really matter. That's a decision, not a rule.
- Work one word at a time. Jumping between nodded, sighed and just in the same pass makes it hard to see what each one is doing.
Take a hypothetical 90,000-word novel where the report shows "smiled" 140 times. That's roughly once every 640 words. Not catastrophic on paper, but if half of them land in dialogue tags in the first third of the book, readers will feel it far more than the raw number suggests.
A count shows a habit, not a score
This is the part people skip. Pendrilo's own guide is explicit that a count is not a score, and it's worth taking seriously. A high number doesn't mean the prose is bad. A low number doesn't mean it's good.
Consider a few cases. A romance full of quiet looks across rooms might legitimately lean on "smiled." A hard-boiled detective narrator might use short, flat verbs on purpose. A children's chapter book might repeat words because young readers like the rhythm. A thriller can repeat "run" because the characters are running.
The number is a flashlight, not a verdict. It tells you where to look. What you do when you get there depends on what the moment needs.
Ask of each hit: is this the best way to deliver this beat, or just the first one I thought of?
If it's the best way, keep it and move on. If it's the first one you thought of, you've found a spot where the writing can improve.
What to do with "smiled" and "nodded" once you've found them
Replacing every "nodded" with "bobbed her head" is the classic bad fix. You've swapped the word and kept the habit. Better options, roughly in order of how often they work:
Cut the beat entirely
Many gestures exist only to break up dialogue. If the exchange is clear without them, delete them. Two people agreeing in conversation rarely need a nod written out.
Replace the gesture with something specific
A smile can become what the character does with their hands, what they look at, or what they say next. "He smiled" is generic. "He turned the cup a quarter-turn on its saucer" tells us he's stalling, and it can only belong to him.
Move the emotion into the dialogue or interior
If the smile exists to show warmth, maybe the line itself can carry it. Or a thought can. You don't need a facial expression every time someone feels something.
Keep a few on purpose
When you reduce a word from 140 to 30, the survivors get stronger. A rare "smiled" at the end of a hard chapter lands harder than the hundredth one.
For filler words and wordy phrases, the process is faster. Cut, reread the sentence aloud (Studio's Read Aloud can do this if you'd rather hear it), and keep the version that sounds like your narrator.
Protect your work, then check your page count
A pass like this touches hundreds of sentences, so make a safety net first. Studio keeps versions when you open a book, every 15 minutes and on save, and it keeps the last 50. Named versions are kept permanently, so give the pre-pass state a clear name like "Before overused-word pass" and you can always compare or go back. Restoring creates a new book rather than overwriting your current one, which makes it low-risk to try.
Cutting filler also shortens the manuscript, sometimes by a few thousand words across a full novel. That can change your page count, spine width and print cost. After your pass, run the new word count through the free Words → Pages Estimator to see where you land before you recalculate anything for your paperback.
Then run Prose Check and the Echo Report one more time. You're not hunting for zero. You're confirming that the habits you chose to reduce are actually reduced, and that you didn't create a new one along the way. Writers who ban "smiled" often start leaning on "grinned" without noticing.
If you haven't tried this workflow yet, Pendrilo Studio is a Windows app and free during the beta. You can sign up on Pendrilo to get access, and your manuscript stays on your own computer while you work.
A simple order of operations
If you only remember one sequence, use this one: draft the whole book, make a named version, run the Echo Report for the big patterns, work through them one word at a time, then use Prose Check chapter by chapter for filler, wordy phrases, weak verbs and close repeats. Finish by rereading a couple of the heavily edited chapters in one sitting, because that's when over-editing shows. If a scene has gone beige, put a little of your voice back.
Your overused words are a fingerprint. The point of finding them isn't to erase it, just to keep it from being the only thing readers notice.
