What is an Expletive?
A word or phrase that serves to fill a sentence without adding meaning.
Oooh Expletive! How Your Creative Writing Can Benefit from These Meaningless Words
Expletives are the useless words/phrases that lurk around in your writing, padding out sentences without adding any real meaning.
They add an unnecessary drag to your writing and can bore the reader to tears. Oooh, don't use expletives! Instead, get to the point and use real words with real meanings.
Not to be confused with curse words (AKA expletives of another nature), these are the words like 'there,' 'it,' and 'that' that are usually implied or assumed rather than necessary to convey a clear idea or thought. For example, compare 'there is a red ball on the table' with 'a red ball sits on the table.' The second sentence is more concise and to the point, conveying the necessary information without the additional filler.
So, the next time you're writing, be aware of the expletives lurking in your sentences and give them the boot in favor of clear communication with real words.
J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is notorious for its expletive-laden prose, with the protagonist Holden Caulfield frequently swearing throughout the novel. While detractors argue that the swearing does little to add to the book's narrative, Salinger's defenders point out how the use of expletives can serve to establish character and tone, as well as add a sense of realism to the dialogue.
Even one of the most influential and widely-read books, the Bible, is not immune to the occasional expletive. In Genesis 3:14, after Adam and Eve succumb to Satan's temptation and eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, God delivers a curse upon the serpent: 'And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.' Here, the word 'thou' serves no real purpose aside from fill out the sentence, making it a prime example of an expletive.