Writing is an important practice for self-examination, expression, and vocation or ministry for many of you, so I plan to start including occasional tips and resources that might improve your confidence and skill as a writer. Here's a tool to add to your writing toolbox.
Writers can overuse “empty words”
One of the biggest revelations of using an editor (and I highly recommend Karen R. Sanderson—The Word Shark) was to discover how many “empty” words I was using: words such as “something,” “anything,” and “that.” She believes being specific is so much more interesting than being generic, and of course, she's right!
As much as I write, though, I still find I often use the same word in a paragraph without realizing it, and this nifty little tool— The Word Frequency Counter—can catch that without my having to hire a proofreader.
Just copy and paste your text into the window provided at this site (see screenshot above) and press “Submit.” Here's what came up when I pasted a paragraph from a book review I wrote recently. It lists the main words in order of how often they were used in that text.
None of the words appearing more than once caused me any concern, and I didn't see any of the boring words I'm inclined to use. Even good words shouldn't be duplicated in the same sentence, so this tool lets you know when that happens too.
Writers, check yourself!
Writers, copy and paste some excerpts from your own writing to get valuable feedback on words you might be using too much.
Thank you to WriteWords, a community of writers in the UK, for providing this free tool for all of us. And a nod to my friend Dr. David Jones for discovering this and sending me the link.
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I love this! What a cool tool! I tried it at lunch time today and was surprised what it told me. I am going to incorporate this into my proofreading and editing biz. I catch most problems, but this is so groovy! I am sharing this blog on my FB too!
I’m so glad you saw this, Karen! I knew you’d love it, and I was going to send it to you if you hadn’t seen it. I can see how great a tool it would be for your editing/proofreading work.
What a great little tool. I am sure to discover things about my writing I never new. Thanks for sharing Elizabeth!
Don’t you love it, Mickey? A friend of mine sent me the link, and I had to keep putting sample text in it to try it on different types of content. I’m so glad you like it. I think it’s going to help me in my writing too. One odd thing that it does is to count anything on either side of an apostrophe as a separate word. So you might find that “they’re” becomes “they” and “re” and you’ll wonder where on earth you used “re.”
Good to know, Elizabeth! Another ‘tool’ to use is reading our stories out loud. It’s amazing how that helps us discover that we’re using words too frequently. Lastly, one of my creative writing exercises is to write a story only using one-syllable words. Really makes a writer ‘pare’ down. Or, write a story with each sentence only four words, or five words, etc. All good ways to tune up our word usage. 🙂
Oooooh, those sound like excellent exercises, Pamela! I was embarrassed that I failed to use this tool for my content in the last email I sent out to readers, and right in the first paragraph was a duplicate word. Grrrrrr….