Today my friend Jenna sent me a link to a terrific article about sensible word choices: Click here. The article features a useful list of words that are often unnecessary and tend to add clutter to sentences: just, often, then, that, and others.

I wouldn’t try to eliminate the words that author Julia McCoy is targeting (and I don’t think McCoy would take that route either). The key is to double-check to see if they’re really necessary when they show up in something you’ve written.

I see that I used one of them just a moment ago: that. Please, please don’t take that away from me! It’s a useful word. But McCoy is right: Often that – and the other words she discusses – are unnecessary.

(There you go: I used the word just not once but twice in this post! And I used often…sigh.)

The article is a great tool for encouraging writers to look more closely at their word choices. Highly recommended!