Another overused word thread: one, head, and back

I guess you'll have to look at the individual occurrences of the word and see what you're doing with it. Also, is it possible that the results are including the letters "o n e" found inside other words?

Good point, Beth. I think you may have nailed the problem.

I just used 'Find' in Word and entered 'one' with no conditions - came back with over 500 and it included words like done and someone.

You don't say what tool you used, blackcat777, but you may be advised to use a different tool, or try it again for 'one', but in either case check the settings first to see if you can limit the searching to the frequency use of complete words only.

If one heads there and back a lot, one could overuse those words. Otherwise I'm baffled.

Assuming you aren't using the formal "one" for generalizations, maybe you could be overusing "one of". "One of the Xes" could be replaced with "an X".

"Back" is definitely one of mine. One of my WIPs, I had more instances of "back" than I had pages. Lots of looking back and turning back and touching someone's back. I also overuse "That". Those are the only two words I have on my general editing notes to look for due to overuse. I'm sure that list will grow as I get into more edits.

Easy substitutes exist for all of those words, and rephrasing sentences may help, too. The fact that you have noticed excessive use is a good thing.

caw

Tangent question: (sorry)

When I first started using a computer to write, I used an editor called "VI" (Visual editor) - it's a UNIX thing, and unless you're an old fart such as I, you've probably never heard of it. VI has no spelling check, or grammar, or any of that stuff - and formatting was done with NROFF or TROFF (never mind that) - it was primitive. But one thing I could do in the UNIX environment was easily search for frequency of word usage. It was an external process where you push the VI file into different utilities, to separate each word into a single line, sort it, then do a unique word count (which would give you the number by each word), then then strip out redundancies via a streaming editor. What you would get is a list of words with a number beside it indicating how many times it was used. Sounds confusing, but I could actually do this via a single command.

Now I'm using MS Word (10) and would love to have the same functionality as I had back then. I don't know my way around Word all that well, so I'm probably missing some great feature that would do this for me. Is there a way to do this?

What I currently do is search for words that I suspect might be overused via the 'Find' feature. To me, this is a pretty klutzy method.

You can try this for frequency counter.... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...e/1fdf92c2-615e-49a2-8f12-43e48b031fb3?auth=1

Word underlines grammar problems in green squiggly line. If you have redundancies, such as "that that" put together, it tells you automatically with these error messages. Red squiggles are spelling errors.

Word is not error free. If you meant to type the word public, but you typed pubic, it won't warn you. For an easy count feature, in Word, try clicking the square (bottom right of Word window) that reads Words: #. It gives character counts, how many paragraphs, lines, pages, and words (for the entire document, or for a highlighted portion of text).

An easy way to use find, in Word, is Ctrl+F.

Enlightened said:

Word is not error free. If you meant to type the word public, but you typed pubic, it won't warn you.

Click to expand...

Not exactly. It won't catch it as a spelling error, but might catch it as a grammar error, depending on context. Which is the best argument for NOT turning off the grammar checker. Easily mistyped things like there for their and it's for its nearly always get nailed by the grammar checker.

caw

indianroads said:

What I currently do is search for words that I suspect might be overused via the 'Find' feature. To me, this is a pretty klutzy method.

Click to expand...

If you use the Replace function when you open the Find window, and choose to replace the word in the search box with the exact same word, it will tell you how many replacements it made.

There may be another way to do it, but that's the only one I'm familiar with.

'Replace' in a colour (I use red) and the changes stand out.

blacbird said:

Not exactly. It won't catch it as a spelling error, but might catch it as a grammar error, depending on context. Which is the best argument for NOT turning off the grammar checker. Easily mistyped things like there for their and it's for its nearly always get nailed by the grammar checker.

caw

Click to expand...

But and might.... Right, not error free.

Great thread. Something I know I need to work on, so I really appreciate the tips

This is such a problem for me! What are some ways that you can work on that?

Scrivener is awesome for this.

It has a lot of bells and whistles but one of the handy features is "project statistics."

It will give you a count of the number of times you use a word.

I could go on and on about the program but it is generally polarising - people love it or hate it.

They have a 30-day free trial so you can see if it works for you