Writerly introspection

[estepheia]

Is there such a thing as a program that will analyse one's vocab? I'd like to find out which words I use too much. Some I already know and try to cut down on, but a statistical list would be great.

Words I use too often:
look, watch, somehow, something, almost, suddenly, when.

ETA: Oh, um, dear friends, feel free to add to that list if you've noticed me using a certain word or expression ad nauseum.

Comments

[bathsweaver.livejournal.com]

I have this same problem, except I most notice it in my punctuation. The "--." I LOVE the dashes, and when using them I often feel like the doting mother who forces all her friends to look at countless pictures of her ugly, sticky-faced toddler whenever she sees them. I know I should let up and throw a few semi-colon or even--hey!--periods into the frikkin' mix, but I never can manage to. Italics, also. God, I do love italics.

As far as your vocab, I've never noticed anything in your posts--(eep! The dash!)the too-oft repeated words or phrases seem to be a phenomenon of conversation, it seems. Eh--in my utterly un-authoritative, wholly flawed and half-baked theory of the moment.

[estepheia.livejournal.com]

If you haven't noticed any particular words, that's fine. I read a story the other day where the author uses the word 'shatter' for coming/having an orgasm every fucking time. Like every few paragraphs, sometimes several times in one sex scene. It really got on my wick. :-)
Reading that story made me wonder if maybe I was doing that kind of thing without being aware of it....

[lumenara.livejournal.com]

If you're using Word, you could always do a "find" (ctrl+f) to see how many occurences you have of a particular word within your document.

I worry about repeated words, too. And also overuse of my favorite punctuation and linguistic quirks.

[caille.livejournal.com]

Exactly what I was going to suggest, lumenara. I've read that some people do searches on simple words like "very" and find they can delete most of them. Estepheia, you don't do this, but writers who get a bit too fond of Buffy rolling her eyes could do a search on roll, just to see if they've exceeded the minimum daily requirement.

[estepheia.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, those pesky eye rolls and head tilts. I'm guilty of the latter. Definitely. Mind you, so is JM. :-)

[estepheia.livejournal.com]

Using 'find' is good if you already know what words you use too often. If you want to find out which ones to put on the black list, this command does not help.

But thanks anyway. Counting occurances might come in handy. Good idea!

[thenyxie.livejournal.com]

Suddenly. That one gets me every time. So does almost. I'm also overly fond of ellipses :) Yes, ctrl+f and search in Word (or whatever) for certain words is the best way. If there's software, I haven't heard about it, but I hope that there is! This is something I want to check myself on as well.

[(Anonymous)]

I think this (http://schnoodles.com/cgi-bin/web_freqs.cgi) is something like what your looking for although its a web based statistics generator rather then a macro or utility.

Btw. I seem to remember (my Word install's gone Kaablooee so I can't check) that the search/replace feature gives you a occurrence count, so instead of using search you can just search/replace with the same word.

Ancient

[(Anonymous)]

Arghh slightly wrong url, trying again. stupid/copy paste never works when I don't push the right keys.

Web Frequency Indexer (http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/webtools/web_freqs.html)

Ancient

[estepheia.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for the useful link!

And crap! Have to add 'just' and 'but' to my list of unwanted words. ;-)

Some links

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Steffi,

If you are looking for some freeware concordance programs, I recommend to have a look at

http://web.bham.ac.uk/A.Reed/scp/

or at

http://www.linglit.tu-darmstadt.de/wconcord.htm

The first one generates a lot of statistical data. Seems to me the better of the two.

The second program has some problems identifying and eliminating quotes. So the word list it creates looks a little bit strange. But after exporting the list to a text file and importing it into Excel it looks much better.

Both programs do not allow you to sort the lists by frequency. So export to Excel is a must.

Then there is

http://www.megaputer.com/products/ta/index.php3

The trial version of Text Analyst allows you to analyze text files up to 100KB. This software does not simply create a word list, but does a semantic analysis. You can see which words you are using in similar contexts. I could not make to much of it, but then I am no linguist :-)

I hope this information helps.

Cheers,

Lutz