(From Ulysses Blog)
Running fingers through their hair, dropping their jaw in surprise, shiver down their spine — these are all things that happen more in fiction than they do in real life. Body language is a good shorthand for emotion, but avoid cliches
Often when writing we’re overly verbose. Maybe it’s because you’re trying to understand the characters yourself, maybe you’re trying to be too wordy. But economy of words means power. Common examples:
Too much information! Specifically, avoid info dumps. Providing a detailed list of the technical capabilities of a fighter plane the moment it is mentioned in your thriller is an info dump. Outlining the history of an ancient building as your character walks into it to meet with their one true love is an info dump.
If you need the reader to be aware of a piece of information, then think about how to share that, and even if you do need to share it at all. A sprinkling of information within the narrative is fine, but a paragraph or more is usually overdoing it. Perhaps one character can ask a question of another, or you can reveal the information gradually. If you really must share bucketloads of information in one go then you could frame it as a news report or something like that but, in general, info provided all at once in a big torrent is rarely fun to read.
Overuse of a character’s name is a common error I find in manuscripts. Scott did this, Scott did that, Scott jumped over here, Scott fell down there, Scott muttered to himself that he was a clumsy oaf. Once you have established which character you are talking about, you don’t need to mention their name every time; whole paragraphs can go by with just pronouns — he, she, they — as long as there is no confusion about who is doing what. Scenes involving multiple characters will, understandably, require a more frequent use of names but even then, if it is obvious who you are talking about then a pronoun is just fine.