You know you write echoes. Within your prose lurk certain words, unconsciously written, that grate on readers because they needlessly repeat. Unless you’re writing about the Strategic Air Command, these three words should not appear more than a few times throughout your article, novel or short story. But how do you spot the repetitions your editing eyes don’t see?
One way is to run your opus through a word frequency program, which spits out a list that includes every instance of every word you used, while what you really wanted to discover are those Few Nails That Stick Out.
Try this. Go to www.wordle.net and select “Create” at the top of the page. Then paste your text into the square labeled “Paste a bunch of text,” and hit “Go.” Wordle will produce a word cloud, an artful, colorful pattern resembling a cloud, in which your most frequent words will appear LARGER than less frequent words. Adjust the cloud for colors and orientation, to aid your search. Now you can spot not only the obvious, but also the unanticipated.
Look for surprises, words you did not expect to Appear So Large. Three that recently infested my chapters were away, shoulder and mashed. Now, having noticed these standing nails, go back and hammer down the ones you don’t need. Do you truly require every shoulder? Can you re-word, substitute or eliminate some without damaging the clarity or precision? Even if you are satisfied all those shoulders have earned their places, what about the mashed’s and the away’s?
In this post, word and words are most common, followed by every, frequent and cloud. I left them standing there with hands in their pockets. I hope you don’t mind.
Thanks for the good tip, Ed. This will become a valuable tool in my editing arsenal. I normally just use the “Find” word option to locate all the times I’ve used a certain word or words in a piece. This works great to find misspellings (or is it really mispellings???). 🙂
I echo Annette’s first two sentences!
Excellent tip, Ed. I usually didn’t find my echoes until amazon revealed all with its concordance. I don’t think they do that anymore.
My taller-than-life word: just! I just had to cut it from every paragraph.
Thanks Ed. I was just reminded of my echos in comments from critique group. I appreciate the tip on the tool to help find them.
I agree, Ed
Thanks a lot.
Albert (freshly returned from the innards of the hospital!
Welcome back, Albert. Now stop flirting with the nurses and write something for us.
This is a great tip, Ed. Thank you! I hope you’ll publish it in our September newsletter.
Ed,
Thanks for the tip. I can JUST imagine my echo words, desired or not. This will help me clean the unwanted and look for fresher ways to write.
Ed that’s an amazing help. It makes it easy to see which words I’ve overused, now if you could just find me a program to fix them.