Remember a few months ago how I wrote about the uses of “stated” and “drawled” as dialogue tags in a fantasy novel I was reading? Well, the latest book in the series came out this month, and I feel like the author is using those words even more now than she used to. It’s like she read my blog and said “this’ll really piss off this one reader of mine, heh heh heh.”

No, I’m sure she didn’t do that.

But I’ve noticed another repetitive dialogue tag: “ground out” — as in “to grind [something] out”. You know, something like this:

“I’m really pissed off,” Bill ground out.

I’m not saying this isn’t something you can use in your writing. In fact, it’s quite evocative. But you get one use of it per book. Maybe two.

The closest I’ve come to doing this is to use the phrase “screwed [your/his/her/my] eyes shut”, but in the entirety of Holiday Heat to this point — more than 330 stories — I’ve used it a total of ten times. Even that is too much in my mind, but again, it’s an evocative phrase that I like to use to convey a specific feeling or emotion. And I never use it more than once in a story — maybe twice in a single novel, tops. There are just so many other ways I could say what I’m trying to say.

At least I’m not grinding things out every fourth or fifth page.

Seriously. If you think you’re overusing a phrase, you probably are. Do a quick find on it and you’ll know for sure.