Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Word Counter

As promised, another trick up my sleeve for clean editing. This one takes care of pesky repeated words. These are SO hard to recognize in your own writing, so easy in your critique partners'. But, for the ones they miss--or if you aren't fortunate enough to have a crit group--there's Word Counter. It tallies occurrences of all the words in the text you paste into it. It will process 19-20,000 words, but I think it's more useful, and faster, to give it a chapter or two at a time. Over 20,000, and internal errors occur.

There is a promise (enticement?) of being able to load a document in the future. The present options are to exclude or include small words, such as "the" and "it"; to list 25, 50, 100, or 200 overused words; and there's a beta version and an original version. The beta version will look for base words that you've added "ed" or "ing" to, as an example.

For fun, you can submit prose to see if it contains political leanings. Or you can look at the Smugopedia blog and post something opinionated.

Try it out and see what it finds--wordcounter.com. Have fun!

PS. You can even do this on another screen while you're furiously typing NaNo words. Maybe.

5 comments:

  1. Interesting comments about figuring out your word count. Thanks! Barb

    ReplyDelete
  2. So useful Kaye - repetition is one of my besetting sins and it is so difficult to spot.

    Ann

    ReplyDelete
  3. OH, what a terrific thing! Thank you! I always use shrugged, grinned, really, just and only..amd now, I'll be able to see justh ow often. Oh, do I really want to??

    Oops. See what I mean?

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete