Bad Writing Habits Worth Breaking: A Working Checklist

I have edited enough manuscripts to know that most weak writing is not missing talent. It is strong writing buried under accumulated bad habits, a passive sentence here, an unexplained jargon term there, a cliché where an original thought should have gone. None of these is dramatic on its own. They are small, repeated choices, and the damage is cumulative, which is exactly why they are so hard to see: each one feels too minor to matter, and together they quietly wreck the prose.

Think of bad writing habits like plaque on teeth. No single meal rots a tooth, and no single weak sentence ruins a piece, but the buildup is relentless and invisible until the damage is done. The cure is not a heroic one-time scrub, it is the daily habit of noticing and clearing, and the checklist below is your mirror. Start with the three or four you recognize in your own work, fix those, then come back for the next round.

What grammar habits weaken your writing?

The grammar-level habits are the ones that operate sentence by sentence, and they are the easiest to fix once named. Overusing adverbs is the classic: “she walked quickly” is weaker than “she rushed,” because a strong verb eliminates the adverb propping up a weak one. Defaulting to passive voice buries the actor, so “the report was written by the team” becomes clearer as “the team wrote the report.” Inconsistent tenses disorient the reader when you drift from past to present mid-paragraph, so pick a tense and hold it. And spelling mistakes that spellcheck misses, their/there/they’re, its/it’s, require your own eyes, because the software cannot read intent.

Punctuation carries real weight, and ignoring it changes meaning: a misplaced comma turns “Let’s eat, Grandma” into “Let’s eat Grandma.” A few more sentence-level offenders round out the category. Overusing exclamation points makes you sound like you are shouting; one per article is plenty, and the writing itself should convey emphasis. Overusing parentheses breaks the reader’s flow, so if the aside matters, integrate it, and if it does not, cut it. Orphaned pronouns leave “it,” “this,” and “they” floating without a clear antecedent, forcing the reader to guess what you mean, and most will not bother. And overusing “that” clutters everything: “she said that the report that he wrote that morning was the one that needed revisions” improves the moment you remove every “that” you can without changing the meaning.

What structure and organization habits hurt a piece?

Structure is where good sentences still add up to a bad piece. It starts with no clear thesis or focus: if you cannot state what the piece is about in one sentence, the reader cannot figure it out either. Weak openings lose people immediately, because the first paragraph decides whether anyone reads the second, and an opening that restates the title or defines a term the audience already knows has already failed. Throat-clearing is the related sin, the warmup paragraph that circles the topic before arriving, the “to understand X, we must first consider Y” preamble; delete the first paragraph of almost anything you write and check whether the second is a better opening, because it usually is.

The rest of the category compounds those. Burying the lede hides your strongest point in paragraph four when readers decide in seconds whether to continue. Rushing the ending makes a conclusion feel like the writer ran out of energy, when it should feel as deliberate as the opening. Missing transitions between sections force the reader to build the bridge themselves. Inconsistent pacing, 500 words on a minor detail and 50 on a major one, confuses the reader about what matters. Walls of text signal “this will be hard to read,” so especially online, white space is your friend. And inconsistent or ignored formatting, mixed fonts, random bold, shifting heading styles, or flouting a style guide, tells the reader or editor you did not care enough to check.

What style and voice habits should you break?

Style is where a competent piece becomes a forgettable one. Repetitive sentence structure, subject-verb-object then subject-verb-object then subject-verb-object, numbs the reader, and failing to vary sentence length compounds it: a paragraph of all long sentences exhausts, all short ones chop, and mixing them creates rhythm, since short sentences punch and long ones flow, a craft covered fully in how rhythm gives prose a pulse. Limited vocabulary shows when you repeat the same word three times in a paragraph, though the fix is not swapping simple words for obscure ones to sound smart.

Overcomplicating language is its own trap: the reflexive reach for a fancy synonym, “use” swapped for a longer Latinate word, “help” swapped for a longer word that means the same thing. Complex words do not make you sound intelligent; clear ones do. Hedging drains authority, and a sentence like “it could perhaps be argued that this might somewhat indicate a possible trend” says nothing; qualifiers have their place, but if every sentence carries “somewhat,” “perhaps,” or “it seems,” you sound like you do not believe your own points. Then there is inconsistent tone that drifts formal to casual, no personal voice so the work could have been written by anyone, permanently copying another writer’s style so you never develop your own, and clichés like “thinking outside the box” or “it is what it is” that signal you stopped searching for the best way to say it. Underneath all of them is the deepest one: writing to impress instead of to communicate, choosing an inflated academic phrase when you mean “way of thinking,” which impresses no one and loses readers.

What content and substance habits undermine credibility?

Content habits attack the reader’s trust in what you are really saying. Fillers and fluff are words added to reach a count, not to communicate, so if a sentence adds no information, remove it. Overexplaining insults the reader by spelling out what they can infer, and too much exposition front-loads background before the point the reader came for. On the credibility side, under-researching plants unsupported claims and factual errors that destroy trust faster than any stylistic flaw, forgetting to cite sources steals credit that is not optional to give, and misusing quotes or facts, attributing a line to the wrong person or pulling a statistic out of context, is worse than leaving it out.

The rest of the category is about aim. Ignoring the target audience produces writing too technical for a general reader or too basic for an expert, failing both. Ignoring SEO in online writing means nobody finds the article, which makes its quality irrelevant. Poorly constructed titles break a promise, since the title tells the reader what they will get and a misleading one makes them feel deceived. And pushing a theme too hard, hammering the same message in every paragraph, makes the reader stop hearing it; make the point and trust them to absorb it. Many of these overlap with the specific tells in the phrases that make writing sound artificial, because vague, hedged, cliché-stuffed language was a human failing long before machines learned to imitate it.

What habits specifically hurt fiction?

Fiction has its own long list, and most of it comes down to keeping the reader inside the story. Underdeveloped characters exist only to serve the plot and feel like cardboard, so give them motivations, contradictions, and lives beyond the scene; inconsistent character behavior, a cautious character suddenly reckless with no explanation, breaks the reader’s trust. Telling instead of showing is the cardinal one: “she was angry” is telling, while “she slammed the folder on the desk and walked out without a word” is showing, letting the reader experience the emotion instead of being informed of it. Over-filtering through attribution does similar damage, since filter words, “he noticed the door was open, she felt the cold air, he thought it seemed wrong,” put a pane of glass between reader and scene; drop them and “the door was open, cold air poured in, something was wrong” puts the reader inside it.

The craft failures pile up from there. Overusing dialogue tags (“he exclaimed, she retorted, he opined”) draws attention where a plain “said” stays invisible, and action beats break up dialogue better. Stilted dialogue that sounds scripted needs to be read aloud until it sounds like a real person. Then there is avoiding conflict, since stories need tension and characters who face no obstacles are boring; relying on deus ex machina, solving a problem with a convenient coincidence, which tells the reader you wrote yourself into a corner; and inadequate resolution that drops the thread or resolves it in a sentence, betraying the narrative contract. Add lack of subplots, missing scene-setting so characters talk in a void, failure to build suspense, head-hopping between viewpoints without clear breaks, thin sensory detail that leaves the world flat, writing in a genre whose conventions you do not understand, lack of emotional depth, stereotyping cultures into lazy shorthand, and starting every first-person sentence with “I” until the narration reads like a police report (“I walked to the door, I opened it, I saw the car”). Each one quietly pushes the reader back out of the story you worked to pull them into.

What habits are specific to ghostwriting, process, and discipline?

Ghostwriting adds four failures of its own, and they are failures of the assignment, not the prose. Failing to capture the client’s voice defeats the entire point, because if the finished book sounds like me instead of the client, I have failed the core job. Ignoring the client’s goals means prioritizing my creative vision over their objectives, which is writing the wrong book. Breaking confidentiality by naming clients or hinting at who I have written for violates the fundamental trust of the profession. And overstepping boundaries forgets that the client has final say, since the name on the cover belongs to the person making the decisions.

Then there is process and discipline, where good writers still sink good work. Skipping the editing process ships a first draft as if it were finished, when every piece needs at least one revision and most need several. Relying on spellcheck as proofreading misses “form” for “from,” “manger” for “manager,” or “pubic” for “public,” none of which the software flags, so read every word yourself. Not reading your work aloud lets awkward phrasing and clunky rhythm survive, when reading aloud is the single fastest way to catch what your eyes skip; if you feel silly, close the door and do it anyway, the same discipline behind a real proofreading pass. Ignoring feedback wastes it entirely, since getting notes and not acting on them is the same as never getting them. The rest are the quiet career-killers: procrastination, cured by breaking a 60,000-word book into manageable 500-word pieces; treating writer’s block as a chronic identity instead of a temporary problem you solve by changing your environment or lowering the draft’s stakes; writing without breaks until fatigue flattens the work; writing without passion the reader will feel; not reading widely, which is the single most effective way to improve; ignoring historical accuracy so anachronisms shatter immersion; and distracting visual choices like Comic Sans in a business proposal, which communicate incompetence as loudly as words. For the wider craft, the writing hub collects it all, and if you want writing with every one of these habits already scrubbed out, that is the work I do. See the habit, and you can change it. That is the whole game.

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Deanna Farnell spent thirty years as a CPA running other people’s companies before she looked at what it had cost, on Leaders and Their Stories: I let all of the other really important things in my life take a back burner to running other people’s companies. Habits worth breaking are usually the ones that were rewarded for years before anyone noticed the bill.