Writing Tips: Looking Out for Filler Words

If you want your writing to be concise, you need to look out for filler words. These terms pad out a sentence without adding anything meaningful, which can make your work harder to read.

The problem is that we often put these terms in our writing without thinking. As such, it’s important to be able to spot ‘filler’ words while editing your work so you can remove them.

What Are ‘Filler’ Words?

In linguistics, a ‘filler’ is a term or sound that indicates a pause without adding anything meaningful to what is being said (e.g. saying ‘um’ or ‘you know’ in the middle of a sentence).

Here, we’re using ‘filler’ to refer to discourse markers in general. These terms sometimes indicate a pause, but they can also be used to link sentences or express an attitude.

Using a few discourse markers in your work can help your writing to flow smoothly. But it is easy to overuse them, and usually it is better to be concise. To help you know what to look for, then, we’re going to look at some common types of filler words.

Attitude Markers

Attitude markers (e.g. ‘basically’ or ‘in my opinion’) can tell us about an author’s point of view. Most of the time, though, they can be removed without losing anything meaningful. For example:

The results clearly show that people definitely overuse filler words.

Here, the author has used the words ‘clearly’ and ‘definitely’ to emphasise a point. However, the sentence would mean the same without them:

The results show that people overuse filler words.

In most forms of writing, then, it is therefore better to cut out these terms, as this will help ensure clarity and concision.

Redundancies

A term is ‘redundant’ when it repeats something unnecessarily. Famous examples of redundancies occur in phrases like ‘twelve midnight’ (since midnight is always twelve o’clock) or ‘past history’ (since history is always in the past). These should always be avoided in formal writing.

Additive Terms

Additive terms are words like ‘however’ or ‘in addition’, which usually link two sentences and show how they are related to one another. These can be very useful in some cases, but you might want to cut a few out (or vary them a little) if you find yourself using them a lot.

Vague Terms of Size or Time

Terms that specify the time something happened or the size of something can be vital. But sometimes the words we use for this are unnecessary or too vague. For instance:

A large number of the students are currently studying for exams.

Here, we have a vague quantity (i.e. ‘a number’) and a redundant temporal term (i.e. ‘currently’). To ensure clarity and concision, it would be better to give a specific number and cut the filler term:

Sixty percent of the students are studying for exams.

It’s not that the original sentence was incorrect here. It’s simply a case of being precise and only using modifying terms when they add something meaningful to the sentence.