The filler-word strike list

Every filler word worth cutting, grouped by how safe it is to cut, in a file you can edit forever.

How to use it

1. Open the file and select all of it. The instructions are inside, so you don't need this page again.
2. Paste the whole thing into the Words to strike box in the transcript cleaner, replacing what's there.
3. Edit it however you like, then save your version. It's yours.

The tool ignores anything after a #, which is why you can paste the file in whole and why a word can be commented out rather than deleted. That also means you can annotate your own entries and keep pasting the same file back in.

The file

How it's grouped

Group	Default	Why
Verbal tics	on	Hesitation sounds. No meaning in any context.
Throat-clearing	on	Said while the brain catches up. Cutting them rarely changes a sentence.
Empty intensifiers	on	They land in speech and read as padding on the page.
Repeated openers	off	Everyone has one or two. Turn on the ones that are yours.
Risky	off	Carry real meaning often enough that cutting them changes what you said.

The two that cause the most damage

"Just" — "just do it" is not the same instruction as "do it." Cutting it flattens a request into an order.

"Like" — a comparison ("like a hammer") and a filler ("it was, like, huge") are the same four letters. No automatic rule tells them apart, which is why the tool shows every cut struck through instead of deleting it, and why this one ships commented out.