Benjamin Dreyer begins his book, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, with the following invocation:
Here’s your first challenge: Go a week without writing
- very
- rather
- really
- quite
- in fact
I happen to use iA Writer when composing anything longer than a quick email (although sometimes BBEdit is the choice), and iA offers to check your writing style. In practice, if you check off the Fillers, Clichés, and Redundancies options, it will unceremoniously render word choices, such as those Dryer excoriates, with a strikethrough.
Take that, Wan Intensifiers and Throat Clearers1.
- That’s what Dryer calls them. ↩