Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Top Ten Tuesday - Words

Now that I'm using Scrivener to draft, I'm able to explore my writing a little more. Today, I thought I'd share with you the ten most frequently used words in my project:
  1. I - 679 times : This one makes sense, since I'm writing from the first person point of view. With 14k words, I guess 679 isn't really that much.
  2. The - 678 times : another one that makes sense.
  3. To - 523 times : This one boggles me. I guess my characters address each other a lot.
  4. It - 286 times : Another pronoun. I guess that means I'm not overusing the names of people and objects.
  5. A - 268 times : I thought I would use this one a lot more.
  6. Was - 264 times : This word is sort of my enemy, but it my first draft I expect it to show up a lot. I like when I see this in the second draft because it's an easy target to change to a stronger verb.
  7. And - 258 times : I'll have to see if I can eliminate this. Maybe break up some of my sentences into a few separate thoughts.
  8. Of - 221 times : Not sure if there's anything I can do about this one.
  9. Me - 209 times : Again, since it's first person, this one makes sense.
  10. My - 206 times : See Me and I.
On an interesting side note, here are some words that I used that I don't even remember writing - hipster, voicemail, peep, flabbergasted. I've also used the word smiled only 15 times, even though I feel like I over use it.

Do you have words that you overuse?

2 comments:

  1. I had this one project where "smile" was the bane of my existence!
    It popped up absolutely EVERYWHERE!
    Good luck sorting through yours!

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  2. I'll admit.."smile" is used quite a lot in my stories. And "was" is always one I have to fix.

    Just checked my 1st person novel....over 72,000 words and I used "I" over 3000 times. LOL!

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