Wednesday Writing

It's an editing day for me, I hope. I guess what I really should say is "it's editing day if work doesn't get in the way," which it will.

One of my favorite things from editing my first MS was when I learned about "crutch words," those words that you tend to use over, and over, and over again. I know I have a ton of them, "I guess," "Anyway," "so," and others.

Here is a blog post about clutch words by Michelle4Laughs: Crutch or clutch words. Throw them in the trash. (A blogger blog).

My first question was "How can you even tell what word is a crutch word?"

I don't remember who first suggested it, but what is recommended is to copy your whole MS and paste it in a program to create a word cloud. The word cloud will find repeated words, tally them, and show you, in an image, what your most used words are. It's fun, funny, and sometimes a little depressing, to see what words pop up often.

Character names came up a lot, which I figured. "I" also came up a lot, but the MS was in first person. But between the very large character names, hid words that were frequent enough to show up in the cloud. I don't remember what they were, but I can tell you, I went back to the MS, did a "Find" command, and took as many out as I could.

I believe this is the generator I used: Wordle.

This is just another way to look at your MS, because we all need a new perspective on occasions.