Not sure where to ask this - - Program to spot repetitive words?

I have words I tend to use overmuch. What I do is, once I've finished, I do a 'find' (top right of the toolbar in Word), searching for whole words only, to see how many times I've used that particular word. The beauty of that is, you can go through your document and change the word to something else, or leave it if it really does suit and then resume and Word will take you right to the next occurence.

I have problems with get, got, and thing. *g* I don't use the 'whole words only' filter for thing because I need to know when I've used 'something' or 'anything' when I should have found a better word.

I just do a search in MSWord. They all come up. Anything beyond this, if you already use word, I would just consider gimmicky. MSWord does the trick.

I like Wordle. It's just a simple tool that gives you a visual image of the words you most frequently use, and it doesn't hurt that the image is beautiful to boot.

I'll second Wordle!

Going to port this to Tech; please keep your hands and feet inside while the vehicle is in motion.

I've been using Text Analyzer a lot. It's simple, you don't have to download anything, you just paste your whole text into the box on their website and press the button. It will come unfiltered, so you get all the 'the's and 'to's counted, too - but you just scroll down till you get to the nouns and prepositions etc. I've discovered I tend to use 'down' and 'back' a lot for instance… You also get phrases counted, from 2 to 8 words – that has been very helpful to me. I had no idea I had pet expressions and phrases until I got them counted like this.

I jam my stuff into Pro Writing Aid if I feel like having an external helping hand. It's not perfect for all things, but it can point out overused words, inconsistencies, long sentences, repetitive sentence starts, etc–and that's handy. It is a paid program, but compared to some more modern and shiny versions of basically the same thing coughAutoCritcough the price is low, AND you can use it on 500 words for free whenever you want. Which of course would be very tedious for an entire novel. But you can use it for free.

Or, you can figure out overused words yourself and use Find. I like to use apps to give me an idea of what I need to fix, and then do the actual work in Scrivener. For example, using an app I figured out multiple phrases I leaned on, and just found them and jiggered them around to better fit the surrounding, instead of just replacing with automatic suggestions. But, for things that are hard to use Find on, like repetitive sentence starts, I find the app comes in handy.

In Scrivener for Mac, go to Project > Statistics... > choose either Compiled or Selected Documents > Word Frequency. You can sort the list by either alphabetical order or by number.

NoteTab has a feature that gives statistics for words and punctuation. Since it's a plain text editor, you have to save-as or copy/paste for a count. I've found it very helpful. Just get the free version. There seem to be quite a few online word frequency counters these days; just searchify a bit.

I have long kept a list of words/phrases/prefixes/suffixes that I have learned I overuse. I add to it every now and then. I use it when I'm editing, and it is very helpful.

caw

I usually use http://www.writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp. It gives the frequency of each word. I haven't compared it to others. There's an option for phrases too (combinations of a specified number of words). It's online, and I don't know if it has a word limit. You could do it in batches if necessary.

Well i do something to help with this. It is a bit of a backward method but it works. If you have a worpress installation anywhere , on a domain or even just on a localhost ( not live ) you get the yoast plugin. Yoast is a seo plugin but one of the very cool things about it is
it analyses your content just an example of what it gives as an output :

1 subheading is followed by more than the recommended maximum of 300 words. Try to insert another subheading.
28.1% of the sentences contain a transition word or phrase, which is less than the recommended minimum of 30%.
The copy scores 62.8 in the Flesch Reading Ease test, which is considered ok to read.
None of the paragraphs are too long, which is great.
24.6% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is less than or equal to the recommended maximum of 25%.
8.8% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is less than or equal to the recommended maximum of 10%.

As for words you can use any keyword density checker tool , usually they will give you a percentage of your word vs your content. While there is no magic density for a chosen word i have looked at some good content and found that they are always around 1.5 % to 2 % this is probably the more natural usage of that particular word.
This is that is the focus of whatever is being written.

If the word you are concerned about is not the focus of you piece i expect the percentage would be even lower than that.