Overusing words

[Jo Zebedee]

This is quite good fun:

Word Frequency Counter

 

[ratsy]

My new 3500 word short has

I - 209 times...that makes it 6% of the word usage...is that really high for a first person story?

knife - 17 times
blood - 13 times
demon - 12 times

and sledgehammer only once, so that's good....

 

[TheDustyZebra]

I'm not sure that's so good. You have twelve demons and only one sledgehammer. But you do have 17 knives, so that's probably where all the blood came from.

 

[Juliana]

I'm not sure that's so good. You have twelve demons and only one sledgehammer. But you do have 17 knives, so that's probably where all the blood came from.

Excellent, TDZ.

Springs, I saw that on twitter today but I dursn't check my work. There are probably a million gazillion 'seems', knowing me!

 

[Hex]

I've got 79 instances of 'knife' (only 24 of 'knives'), 67 of 'blood', 116 of 'eyes' and -- mysteriously -- 72 of 'milk'. I have no idea where the milk comes from (*).

(*) cows, I know.


EDIT: I was right to be suspicious. Word can only find two instances of 'milk' in the whole document. There's something a little wonky about the word frequency counter...

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Oh dear. I'd complain to the source but don't think it's in my interests to do so.*

* t'was picked up as a twitter link from an agent...

 

[Bowler1]

We all have a habit of over using words and we're nearly always blind to them until pointed out to us, usually by a very good beta. Hard editing is the key to further success.

Unless of course... you a blood thirsty serial killer (on paper, I hope) using various weapons to amass a body count only Hollywood could hope to match. Then I suspect there will be some word repeats, such as Eek, run, hide, nooooo, please and mummy - in no particular order.

 

[Ursa major]

From my first chapter (1853 words):

114 the
83 her
56 to
56 a
44 of
31 she
29 and
24 had
20 in
18 not
18 carolyne
15 on
14 was
14 only
14 be
13 s
13 machine
13 d
11 drone
11 but
11 as
11 an
10 this
10 have
10 from
10 could
10 back
​

I'm guessing that the s is actually 's, and the d is 'd. (There is next to no dialogue, so said wouldn't be near the top of the list.)

There are a lot of instances of 'her'; I suspect most of them appeared when I was trying to reduce the number of instances of 'she'. (I wonder whether 'her' is less "visible" than 'she'.)

 

[David Evil Overlord]

That depends on whether her is wearing more revealing clothing than she...