Heaving a textual sigh

The other day I had to remove the word “so” from the beginning of 2/3 of the paragraphs in a lengthy email before hitting send. For a while now I’ve been aware of my tendency to heave a bit of sigh which made it into my prose at the outset of each new paragraph. It’s as if the effort of organizing my thoughts into a few strung together sentences required the use of the two-letter word as a battering ram to burst past a little mental block. Chalking it up to something peculiar to me and my mental processes, I had to give myself permission to use it just to get the words down. I could always go back and delete those little “tics” after finishing whatever I was writing. Coincidentally, Donna Maurer just wrote about it pervading her posts and links to David Weinberger’s musings on it.

So it’s not just me. Apparently that’s an allowable usage. Now about my ellipses affliction…