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But. You don't just interject phrases as a writer because you're used to using them. You'd literally end up with nonsense. Even if you've used them a thousand times before, they have a meaning, and you choose to use them again when that meaning fits what you're writing NOW. So even if the precise words that I pinpointed don't carry the weights that I thought they did, and thus specifically fail in this case to support my argument, in a body of work as big as AMC's we could probably find word patterns and phrases AMC tends to draw upon in certain scenes.
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Or just in general. Most writers I know DON'T think about every single tiny word--they'd never get anything done (and turning out finished work is the name of the game). Nitpicking every tiny phrase and word choice is in fact a rookie habit, from the phase when the writer just cannot learn to be finished and quit "crafting". It's a job, after all, not an art, if you're doing it for a living. And most DO have distinct verbal 'tics'--phrases and word choices that are repeated in widely different contexts, quirks given to characters in completely different settings--it's ingrained and part of their style. Anne tends to have a rather florid (for an SF writer; I'm not saying she's Barbara Cartland) style. So I do think the fact she wrote romance first is a valid point--she uses, probably without any conscious choice, a sentence structure and vocabulary that can lend itself to the romantic.