🎶Just One of Those Things🎵 from James W. Ziskin

What bad habits have you ditched to make yourself a better writer? What good habits have you picked up?

Me trying to write with Tinker on my lap

Trigger warning: I’m going to butt up against conventional wisdom here.

—Hi, my name is Jim and I’ve ditched the practice of searching for and replacing the word “just” in my manuscripts.

—Hi, Jim!

Lots of writers practice this ritual. Somewhere along the way, the word “just” became VNG (verbum non gratum). “Just” gets bullied. Writers pick on it. They’ve decided it’s bad and must be expunged from our work. 

I don’t exactly agree.

Some might argue that “just” is unwelcome because we overuse it. Perhaps. But has anyone actually counted how much we use it? Or does it just seem to be overused? (See how I used it just there?)

In my forthcoming novel, THE PRANK (July 2026, Level Best Books), I counted 231 occurrences of “just” out of 84,000 words. That means “just” accounted for 0.027% of the words.

My last novel, BOMBAY MONSOON, had 101 occurrences of “just” out of approximately 94,000 words. That comes to 0.011% of the total words.

And in TURN TO STONE, I counted 168 instances of “just” out of 109,000 words. That’s 0.015% of the total word count.

Now you may wonder why my latest book has more “justs” than the other two. The reason, I believe, is because the narrator is a thirteen-year-old boy. In BOMBAY MONSOON, my narrator is a journalist in his late twenties. Ellie Stone narrates TURN TO STONE, and she is fairly well known for her precise language and great care with words. A thirteen-year-old narrator is not.

I didn’t set out to use more “justs” in THE PRANK; it simply came naturally from the voice of the narrator.

“Just” can act as an adjective, an adverb, or find itself locked into an idiomatic expression such as “just so.” You really can’t remove “just” from “just so” without changing the meaning. The same can be said for “Just a sec!” “Just you wait!” and “Just in case."    There are as many as fourteen different meanings or shades of meanings listed in Merriam-Webster for “just.” It’s not a one-trick pony of a word. It’s quite versatile.

Which is why we end up using it so often.

But what if we wanted to replace “just” with another, better word? Let’s have a look.

In THE PRANK, I found 112 occurrences of the word “only,” which can serve as a substitute for “just” when the latter is used as an adverb. Besides “only,” there are fourteen examples of “simply” and six of ”mere” or “merely” in THE PRANK. Those three synonyms come to 56% of the appearances of “just,” yet I’ve never heard anyone say we should hunt down those words and eliminate them.

These three words—only, simply, and merely—actually outnumber “just” in my books A STONE’S THROW and TURN TO STONE.

Look, I’m not advocating the overuse of “just” or any other word. But the target on its back perplexes me. It’s a word like so many others. And if readers are determined to throw a book against the wall when they come across it, well, that’s a shame. It’s like refusing to read books written in the first person or present tense. Think of what you might be missing. Aren’t there more important lines to be drawn in the sand? (Like avoiding the passive voice as I just didn’t.) Oh, sugar. I just used “just” again!

Without any hard evidence, I have a gut feeling that “just” is more common in first-person narration than third-. I suppose that’s because it’s a word people use a lot in everyday speech. And first-person narration probably tends to be more colloquial more often than third-person narration is. (I could be wrong, of course.)

When I was a young aspiring writer, one of the most universally accepted bits of writing advice was this: “Write what you know.” Everyone espoused it. Everyone repeated it. Everyone believed it.

Until they didn’t. 

“Write what you know” has gone the way of leeches and blood-letting in medicine. Few writers subscribe to that advice today. And I hope the unjust obsession with “just”will soon follow.

One last thought on “just.” In THE PRANK, the word “out” appears 307 times, 76 more than “just,” and no one complains. The indefinite article (a and an) shows up 1,885 times. And “the?"  3,564 times. Granted, one expects those words to top the list, but I’ll wager few readers throw books against the wall when they come across them.

Now, what good habits have I picked up?

Skip this part if you’re sick of hearing me extol the virtues of text-to-speech for editing. If you’re new to this advice, listen up. I believe text-to-speech is the best editing tool—bar none—since spellcheck. You can buy apps to do this (I recommend Speechify, but it’s $139/year). If you already have a current version of Word, you’re set. Word’s Read Aloud feature does text-to-speech quite well. The voices have become more realistic and, despite the occasional hiccup, they’re fairly natural-sounding. The advantages of text to speech are many. Since the voices only read what’s on the page, there’s no question of assuming a word is there when it’s not. When we read, we anticipate what’s coming next. This can cause us to miss small words like a, of, to, etc. while reading. And this becomes worse when the words we’re reading are our own. The more familiar we become with the text, the more likely we are to glide past missing words.

Text to speech can help in other ways, including finding missing question marks or even commas. It’s also super for rooting out words and expressions repeated in close proximity. Finally, it’s a great tool for gauging the rhythm and pace of your narrative. (I used it to edit this piece, by the way.)

Text-to-speech is the best habit I’ve acquired for editing. Try it and thank me later.

If you’d like to argue over “just,” feel free to leave a comment below. I won’t hate you for it. There’s no right or wrong way to write or edit. That’s what makes a horse race.

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