Do you overuse certain words?

I may try that when I get to work on my WIP today... In the past I have been very guilty of overusing words... Thank god for my wife and beta readers who are very happy to say "If this girl giggles one more time I'll take you red pen and..." Or "How many things can happen quickly in two paragraphs?"

So I've learned to pay attention.

This looks neat... Thanks!

(LOL... I posted the same on both of your threads.)

onesecondglance said:

http://www.wordle.net/create

A fun little toy that works out the frequency of words you use and displays them graphically.

Apparently there are a lot of "likes", "backs", and "doors" in my WIP. Methinks this might need to be remedied in the rewrite.

Bonus points if you find "murder", "autopsy", or something like that in your word cloud... I have quite a lot of "blood" and "eyes", which is a bit icky.

Click to expand...

Way cool.

Mine is heavy on character names, and things like "know", "told", "moment", and "nothing." "Police" shows up; but no cuss words, which is kind of a surprise. No "blood" in mine, but my murder takes place off-screen. (I am too soft-hearted to write this book properly, I think.)

Scrivener has a text-based tool that does the same thing, but in a much less aesthetically-interesting way. It does tally all the words, though, which is kind of nifty. Much to my surprise, I've discovered I only use the word "hedonist" once.

Of all the popular words on my list, I am most concerned about "just." It's up there with "quickly" as something I use too often as a crutch.

onesecondglance said:

I feel that I should clarify that "likes back doors" does not appear in my text.

Click to expand...

You realize if you hadn't said anything nobody would have thought about it.

I've got some smut in mine, although it's quite conventional (especially these days). It doesn't seem to be reflected in the tag cloud, though. Readers will be disappointed, but my dad will probably be relieved.

"Know" is definitely one of mine. I also tend to use "just" and "even" a lot, but they're not at all individual to MTS.

Ugh, I can't get the darn thing to work. I installed Java as was suggested and read through the rest of the FAQ. Everything seems to be in order. <sigh> I'll keep trying. I'm really curious to see what it has to say!