She posted about a website called Wordle, where you can enter a block of text (or if you're OCD like me, 20 pages of it), and it spits out a word-cloud based on that text. You can change the fonts and colors around to make it pretty, but basically, the word-cloud shows you what words you might be overusing in that text.
It's funny, there are a lot of words I know I overuse ("as", "though", and "like" for example), but a few have shown up repeatedly in all of my writing samples that I never thought of before, such as "just," and "one." Will have to watch out for them too...
Just (AH there it is again!) for fun, here are some of the clouds I came up with:
From Stray:
From Origins (both POVs):
I guess when you write in third-person, saying the characters' names a ton is inevitable...
Also, just for fun, a cloud from my blog:
Wow, I talk about book(s) a lot!
Wordle is so fun! I love the one from Origins! And I totally plugged in like 20 pages too. OCD twins!
ReplyDeleteWordle is fun. 20 pages. I laugh. I put in my whole manuscript - 400 pages. Yup. :)
ReplyDeleteThis looks so cool. I've had several people tell me about it. I am trying it this weekend...thanks for the reminder.
ReplyDelete