What throat-clearing actually is
Before a speaker says anything, they sometimes clear their throat — a sound that announces speech is coming without saying anything itself. Writing has a version of this habit, and it’s just as common: a phrase that announces a sentence is about to make a point, without making any part of the point itself.
It is important to note that the cache expires after an hour.
Delete the first eight words and nothing is lost:
The cache expires after an hour.
That’s the test for throat-clearing, and it’s a stricter test than “this sounds a little wordy.” A genuinely wordy phrase can usually be replaced with a shorter one that keeps the same meaning — “in order to” becomes “to.” A throat-clearing opener isn’t replaced with anything. It’s deleted outright, and the sentence starts at the next word.
Writing the sound of a throat clear
If you came here looking for how to type the actual sound of someone clearing their throat — in a text message, a chat, or a line of dialogue — that’s a different question from the one this page answers, but it’s close enough in wording that it’s worth answering directly before moving on.
There’s no single standard; pick whichever convention matches the surrounding text and stay consistent within a document:
*clears throat*or*ahem*— asterisks around a described sound or action, common in chat, forums, and roleplay-style writing.(clears throat)— parentheses, common in scripts and stage directions.Ahem.— capitalized as a stand-alone interjection in prose dialogue: “Ahem,” she said. “Shall we begin?”
Everything below this point is about a different, unrelated meaning of “throat-clearing” — not the sound, but the writing habit of opening a sentence with a dead-weight phrase like “it is important to note that.” If that’s what brought you here, keep reading.
Why writers reach for throat-clearing openers
Nobody writes “it is important to note that” because they think it improves the sentence. It shows up because starting a sentence is the hardest part of writing it, and these phrases are a running start — a way to begin typing before the actual point has fully formed in the writer’s head. By the time “It is important to note that” is on the page, the real sentence is right behind it, ready to go.
That’s a genuinely useful trick during a first draft. The problem is when it survives into the final version. A reader gets no benefit from the running start — they only see the sentence that results, and the runway before the point adds length without adding anything they needed.
Common throat-clearing phrases
Throat-clearing openers cluster into a few recognizable shapes:
Announcing an announcement. “It is worth noting that,” “It should be noted that,” “I would like to point out that” — each one exists purely to introduce the sentence that follows it, and each one could be deleted with the following word capitalized in its place.
Time-and-place filler. “At the end of the day,” “In today’s world,” “In this day and age” — phrases that gesture at a broader context without adding a specific one. They rarely connect to anything concrete in the sentences around them; they’re just a way to sound like the point is being situated in a bigger picture.
Redundant conclusions. “In conclusion,” “To sum up,” “All things considered” — these aren’t always wrong, but they’re only useful once. A document that says “in conclusion” at the start of its last paragraph is using the phrase correctly. A document that says some version of it every few paragraphs is treating a structural marker like a verbal tic.
When it’s not actually throat-clearing
A phrase that looks similar can still be doing real work, and the same test applies: does deleting it lose information? “Please be advised that the office closes at 5 PM on Fridays” is genuine throat-clearing — deleting it changes nothing. But “According to the vendor’s documentation, the office closes at 5 PM on Fridays” is not, even though it has a similar shape, because “according to the vendor’s documentation” tells the reader something specific: where this fact came from. That’s not dead weight, it’s a citation, and citations survive the deletion test just fine.
The distinction isn’t about sentence length or a phrase’s presence on some list. It’s whether removing the phrase removes information a reader needed, or just removes the sound of a sentence clearing its throat before getting to the point.
Why this rule flags sentence-initial phrases only
A phrase like “needless to say” only counts as throat-clearing when it opens a sentence. Buried in the middle of a sentence, the same words might be doing something else — connecting a clause, setting up a contrast — and a rule that fired anywhere in a sentence would start guessing at grammar it can’t actually parse. Anchoring to sentence-start keeps the rule confident: at the very beginning of a sentence, a phrase from this list is reliably doing nothing but announcing the sentence that follows.
A paragraph with the throat-clearing removed
Here’s a paragraph that leans on throat-clearing at the start of nearly every sentence:
It is important to note that the migration finished ahead of schedule. It should also be mentioned that the team ran into fewer issues than expected. Needless to say, the client was pleased with the outcome. At the end of the day, the project came in under budget.
Every sentence opens with a runway before the actual point. Here’s the same paragraph with each opener removed and the next word capitalized in its place:
The migration finished ahead of schedule. The team ran into fewer issues than expected. The client was pleased with the outcome. The project came in under budget.
Same fact per sentence, four fewer running starts, and nothing lost. The second version also reveals something the first one hid: every sentence in this paragraph is short and direct once the throat-clearing is gone, which means the original paragraph’s real problem wasn’t its content — it was the four identical-shaped openers making four different facts sound like the same kind of hedge.
The cost compounds across a document
One throat-clearing opener costs a reader a few seconds. A document that opens several sentences the same way costs something more specific: it trains the reader to skim past the first few words of every sentence, because experience has taught them nothing important lives there. That’s a bad habit to teach a reader, because eventually a sentence will open with something that does matter, and by then the reader has already learned to look past it.
This is also why the fix isn’t just “delete the opener” — it’s worth noticing the pattern itself. A single “it is important to note that” is a minor tic. Four of them in one document, or the same opener reused three times, is a sign the writer reached for a crutch instead of varying how sentences start. Cutting each individual instance treats the symptom; noticing the pattern treats the cause.
Check your own writing
Run your text through the filler & throat-clearing cutter to see every opener flagged, plus a cleaned-text panel with each one already removed and the next word capitalized in its place — the actual edit, not just the diagnosis.
To measure the pattern rather than cut each instance, use the Throat-Clearing Score: it reports how many of your sentences stall, and names the opener you lean on hardest. For the related pattern of “there is” and “it is” burying a sentence’s real subject, see there is, there are.