Within my own writing I'm constantly aware of how many times I use a particular word and regularly check for the number of times I've used words before putting them into sentences. Does anyone else do this? What words do you find yourself constantly thinking "Can I use that again?".

With the advent of amazon.com using concordance my worries have eased a little, but with one of the themes of my book being repetition I do keep wondering whether I'm repeating things too much.

Geoff

I thought I had a fairly good sensor for a repeated words close together, until a professional copy-editor went over my work, and found things like various forms of look/looking/looked, all over the place. I think the record was seven times in one page! Salutary. I'm not sure I'm good at spotting words that I've used too often across the spread of the novel.

I do find reading things aloud helps a lot to spot this kind of thing. But you have to do it late in the day, or they creep back in during later revisions.

Emma

I went through a stage of using "shimmer" and "skin" with every second line, and found it migrating like a virus from poetry to prose - it was really scary! I also overuse the word "just" until I no longer know what it means!!

)

LoL

A
xxx

A good on-line facility for checking out whether you are over-using certain words is this one from Georgetown University.

http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/webtools/web_freqs.html

The results can be quite enlightening.

Chris