How to Eliminate Filter Words from Your Writing

Filter words and phrases put distance between the reader and the scene you’re writing. They create a situation where the reader’s experience is “filtered” through the character’s point of view. You don’t want that. You want the reader inside the scene as much as possible, so eliminate filter words whenever you can.

Filtering alienates readers from the experience. A few quick comparisons:

• Filtered: She wondered what happened to her dog.   Not filtered: What happened to her dog?
• Filtered: Roger felt the black pepper burn his throat.   Not filtered: The black pepper burned Roger’s throat.

Commonly used filter words and phrases

Assume, believe, can/could, decide, experience, feel/felt, hear/heard, know/knew, look/looked, note/noted, notice/noticed, realize/realized, remember/remembered, see/saw, seem/seemed, think/thought, touch/touched, to be able to, watch/watched.

How to eliminate filter words

The easiest way is to become aware of which ones you rely on most, then practice cutting them in draft two and beyond. Notice I said draft two. Editing out filter words is for the polishing phase. It’s fine to lean on them in a first draft, when you don’t want to get bogged down. But the more aware of them you become, the less they’ll show up, even in that messy first draft.

When you reach the polishing stage, here’s a way to use find-and-replace to highlight them:

1. Go to the Home tab (or its equivalent).
2. Pick a highlight color using the text-highlight button.
3. Open Advanced Find and Replace.
4. In the “Find what” box, type your first filter word.
5. Click the Replace tab and type the same word in the “Replace with” box.
6. Open the larger menu (the down arrow at the bottom left).
7. Click Format, scroll down, and choose Highlight.
8. Click Replace All.
9. Repeat for your other filter words.
10. Now every filter word is highlighted, so you can go back and decide which ones are actually filtering the reader’s experience and revise.
11. When you’re done, you can remove all the highlighting with find-and-replace, too.

For more on tightening your prose, see Thirty-Seven Words or Phrases You Should Eliminate from Your Writing.