Filter word finder
Filter words are verbs like saw, heard, and felt that tell the reader a character noticed something instead of showing it. Paste a passage or drop in a file to see them marked, with crutch words and close repeats. It runs in your browser, and nothing is uploaded.
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Separate them with commas, such as nodded, gaze, shrugged.
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| Kind | Found | Per 1,000 words | Most used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Filter words | |||
| Crutch words | |||
| Repeats | |||
| Your words |
Your text, marked
What are filter words?
A filter word places a character between the reader and the scene. "She saw the lantern swing" makes the reader watch her watching. "The lantern swung" lets them see it themselves.
The term comes from writing teachers rather than grammar books, so every list differs. This one keeps to the verbs of seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking that do it most often.
Why and when to cut
Filter words
They report that a character perceived something instead of showing the thing. Cutting "She heard the door slam" to "The door slammed" puts the reader in her place.
Keep it when: Keep one when the noticing is the event: a character who finally sees the knife, or a narrator who feels nothing at a funeral.
- decide
- decided
- feel
- feels
- felt
- hear
- heard
- hears
- knew
- know
- looked
- notice
- noticed
- notices
- realize
- realized
- realizes
- realise
- realised
- saw
- see
- sees
- seem
- seemed
- seems
- smelled
- thought
- watched
- wonder
- wondered
- wonders
Crutch words
They pad a sentence or hedge it. "Very tired" is weaker than "exhausted", and "suddenly" announces a surprise the sentence should deliver.
Keep it when: In dialogue they are how people talk. "That" is often needed for the sentence to parse, so read it aloud before cutting.
- actually
- basically
- certainly
- completely
- definitely
- just
- literally
- quite
- rather
- really
- simply
- somehow
- somewhat
- suddenly
- that
- totally
- very
Repeats
A distinctive word used twice within a few lines sounds like an echo, and readers hear it even when they cannot say why.
Keep it when: Names, deliberate refrains, and words with no good synonym can repeat. Readers skim past a name used twice.
Your words
Every writer has a few words they lean on. Add yours and they are counted and marked with the rest.
Keep it when: You chose these, so you know when one belongs.
When a mark is wrong
The finder matches words, not meaning. It marks "felt" in "a felt hat" and in a line of dialogue where a character says how they feel, and both are fine. Treat each mark as a question.
Deep point of view is where cutting pays off most. In a distant narrator's voice, or in a first-person account told long after the fact, some filtering is the voice.
How it counts
Words are counted the way Tabularia reads prose. A repeat is a word of four or more letters used again within sixty words in the same paragraph, leaving out common words like "said" that are meant to repeat. Only the twenty closest repeats are marked, so the worst echoes stand out rather than every one.
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