You are so repetitive!

I'm going to be mad about something I actually do myself. It annoys me when I do this.

So do you ever get stuck on a word or phrase and use it all of the time for like a week? Think: Mean Girls' Gretchen Weiners when she says "fetch" all the time.  I know that I've personally had my week long binges of the words: "solid", "stellar", "sensational", "prime", "epic", etc.  It drives me nuts when I have them.  I will use one of these words, and suddenly cringe, realizing that by overusing it, I've erased it's actual meaning and overgeneralized it. I think everyone does this at some point.  We get word or phrase trends.  But if you're around a person for a significant enough period of time, you hear the word over and over and it's super annoying.

Many people have the overuse issue with commas as well. I probably made a couple errors myself in the above paragraph.  If you read a sentence, where there are a ton of commas, that don't belong, it just becomes obnoxious, to read. (see what I did there?) It's not actually that difficult to be even relatively grammatically correct with one's use of commas. They only belong in certain spots.  There are rules on when one should and shouldn't use them. I won't go into it; you can bore yourself to death if you want to find them. All I'm saying is that if you completely overuse them, it becomes annoying and their purpose is erased because there is no consistency in when you are and aren't using them.

The best way to stop overusing something, be it words, phrases, or commas, is to force yourself to realize your error.  As soon as you say that word you've been abusing since last friday, in your head tell yourself to find some other way to describe what you want to say. Give yourself a little mental slap on the wrist, that way it sticks with you that you want to get past the word.  When you reread your paper on World War II, scribble out all of the unnecessary commas with bright red pen, and then go back and realized how much you overused them.

It's easy to get past overusing something. You just have to actually put forth the effort.