Pet Peeves: 2025 Writing Edition

Interesting, title, right? Perhaps a little provocative?

Let’s be clear. I’m talking about writing pet peeves.

I mean, come on. This is a blog ostensibly about writing. And while many of my fellow SleuthSayers and yours truly frequently indulge our impulses to discuss other interests, There’s plenty going on in the writing world right now that merits commentary.

In light of this, I offer below a few of my own beefs about current trends in writing, As well as some pithy observations from other writers among my circle of friends. Where the comment is my own, I have left it unattributed. Other contributors are noted alongside their entries.

With that said, let us begin.

GROUND/FLOOR

I’ve noticed lately that a lot of writers (Many of them, Indie) have a tendency to conflate the words “ground” and “floor”.

For example:

“The glass candelabra dropped from her hand, crashing into a hundred pieces when it hit the ground.” 

This when the character is in a second story bedroom. Not outside, and not even in a basement with a dirt floor!

I have seen this literally dozens of times in books I’ve read over the past year. What’s more, said conflation seems to go only one way. And that is using the word “ground” when the word “floor” is appropriate.

I have yet to see something along the lines of: “Milton stood in the middle of the road, watching the wagon retreat into the distance. And when it had gone from sight, he fell to his knees on the dusty floor.”

Weird, huh?

An actual example of something actually being thrown on the actual ground.

NOT JUST THE TITLE OF A TERRIFIC PETER GABRIEL ALBUM

I’m referring, of course, to the word “so.”

Specifically, at the head of a sentence, and solely used in dialogue.

For example: “So I heard you got cancer.”

I suppose seeing something like this once or twice over the course of 80-90k words is one thing. But here’s the thing about “dialogue leading so”: once it crops up one place, pretty soon you’re seeing it as dialogue tag signaling a transition in every conversation in said book. I have seen this time and again. And that is just lazy writing. Why not just go with: “I heard you got cancer.”?

AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON (OVER)USING A.I.

No question A.I. can come in handy when a writer needs a quick answer to a research question in the middle of a scene. We’ve all been there. It’s like a Google search on steroids.

But (and again, I’m seeing this mostly with Indie writers) I have begun to see bloated passages where paragraphs tend to run together, often repeating the exposition of a certain set of facts over and over, as if to show the importance of said facts, and the intensity of the revelation of their existence by sheer repetition.

Mess around with any form of A.I. long enough and this pattern can seem awfully familiar. And then there’s stuff like this:

Readers Annoyed When Fantasy Novel Accidentally Leaves AI Prompt in Published Version, Showing Request to Copy Another Writer’s Style.

And apparently there are plenty of other examples of this sort of thing.

And when caught out, the authors in question seem to be leaning hard on the notion that what tripped them up and revealed their use of generative AI constituted an “editing mistake.”

Uh-huh.

Laurie Rockenbeck says:

If I see “long moment” I want to scream. (Mainly because a best selling author uses it ten times in every novel….)

David Schlosser (who writes as “dbschlosser”) says:

Hyphenation proliferation. The stupidest example I see everywhere now is 70-percent.

Or seven-out-of-ten.

It's like engineers using Random Capital Letters to tell you How Important This Is.

I (also) have an opinion about "as" from editing non-native English speakers' technical reports.

Because, since, as all *can* mean the same thing ... and so we should choose carefully which word to use in each instance.

Because is explicitly causal. In research on influence and persuasion, it is literally a magic word - people will do things they would not otherwise do when they hear a reason justified by "because."

"Since" and "as" both have temporal implications "because" does not have.

Use "since" to describe time elapsed SINCE something happened - not to describe why what happened since then happened.

Use "as" to describe events occurring simultaneously.

Use "because" to describe cause-and-effect relationships.

Jim Thomsen says:

I would say the growing reliance on histrionic reaction beats in thrillers. From a recently released novel: “Guilt had twisted in my entrails like a knife.”

Other examples:

“Anxiety churns along her skin.”

“Anger, pulsing anger, dripped down her body.”

“Grief hurtled toward me, crashing into me and beating inside my chest like a giant, furious animal.”

“Horror stole over me like a mist, uncurling deep within. And then a fiery knot began to burn in my stomach.”

“Agony was stamped indelibly on his body, weighted across the miserable hunch of his shoulders. He looked smaller somehow, shrunken, the way a grape shrivels into a raisin.”

I collect these.

My evergreen sarcastic retort: “That makes my heart pound like a hooker’s headboard in a highway hotel.”

******

And that is about as great a last word as we’re gonna find. So I’ll leave it there. How about you? Pet peeves? Got ‘em? Share ‘em in the Comments section below!

See you in two weeks!