by Ian McHugh (writing at Alan Baxter: Warrior Scribe)
A few weeks ago, fellow CSFG member Phill Berrie wrote a post about word frequency analysis, a tool he uses in his work as an editor. In his post, Phill included a link to a free online word frequency analyser. Plug the text of your story in and it spits out:
- the total word count of the story
- how many different unique words you’ve used (a, few, weeks, ago, etc)
- and how many times you’ve used them (a=36, few=5, weeks=2, ago=2)
Since I had set aside that weekend for working on the final draft of my novel, I decided instead (see “advanced procrastination”, above) to plug a few of my stories into the online analyser and see what the results were. After plugging all of my stories into the analyser, it told me a bunch of stuff that I already pretty well knew:
- I’m using less adjectives and adverbs than I used to.
- I have developed a habit of overusing the word as to join two clauses in a sentence.
- I somehow don’t write stories between 3,000 and 4,000 words long. Like, ever.
What it also showed, that I hadn’t realised before, was that the number of different unique words that I use has fallen by about 20-25% since I first started writing. For stories over 6,000 words, my number of unique words per thousand has dropped from up near 300 to under 230.
So, why? Read more…
Reblogged this on Ophelia's Fiction Blog.