When you first start writing it is all about getting words on the page. When you’ve been writing for a while you begin to stretch yourself to refine these words into a novel, short story, poem or nonfiction piece. There are many ways to do this but one of my favorite ways is to review and replace the words that I use too much.

If you look over your work carefully you will find you default to certain words. Your default words can be anything. Perhaps you are describing a lawn and you always write that it is a lush verdant landscape or you have a constantly roaring sea or roaring villain.

Time and time again I find myself using the same word or phrase and do my best to weed it out of my writing. I want to write good fiction and not have the same rehashed descriptors. It might be a pain to look through my book or short story to kill my darlings were it not for Word Frequency Counter fromWriteWords.org.uk. 

Word Frequency Counter is one of my favorite free tools. Simply copy and paste your work to the box on the webpage and press submit. It does not matter the lenght. I did it with my novel of 90,000 words. It will give you a list of words and you can also search for repeated phrases. Some of the general words are unavoidable like proper nouns or personal pronouns. But as you scroll down you will begin to see the default words.

I’ve provided the link to the website below.

Whatever you do this weekend I hope you look ahead and find some time to write. I’d say don’t kill yourself by staying up late or getting up horribly early but, if you want to get your work done, you just might have to do so! Godspeed my writing friends!

http://www.writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp

Cheers 

Bob