Friday, May 21, 2010
Having read my buddy’s most recent blog post on “crutch words” which sounds a little rude to me, I’ve decided to follow suit and write a similar one, only I’ll refer to them as “popular words”. This is not to say they’re words that have lots of friends, but words I use most when I write.
So, I copied and pasted my entire novel, Resolution, into Wordle, this handy little tool that produces a pretty little word cloud (pictured left) of all the words I use most. I don’t think there are any real surprises here… perhaps there’s too much use of “really”. My characters are always saying things like. “Really?”, “That’s not really true is it?”, “Oh, really” and “I really don’t think so”. I really think I need to take really out of my novel a bit. In fact it’s no surprise I write really all the time because I say it a lot too. Yes, really!
What would concern me was if I used words like “suddenly” all the time or “then”. Not that many things happen suddenly in novels and I think the word can be over-used. Suddenly, she bumped into a man. Suddenly, she got into the car. And suddenly, it started to rain. Pah! And a lot of first-time novelists (like me) are guilty of writing “and then” which is easily done when you’re telling a story. And then she went to bed. And then she woke up. And then she went to the bathroom. You get my drift.
Next I used Wordle to see what the most popular words are in this blog (pictured below). A lot of them seem to be property-related, which is odd. My last post was indeed on the theme of house buying versus renting and I’ve probably written the odd property-themed post previously, but I’m not sure I mention the subject enough for it to be a popular word in my blog. Hmmm. “Vote” and “politics” leap out at me too, two subjects which I’m neither clued up on nor willing to blog about regularly. More strangeness. Now “crap”, “bother” and “writing”… they’re more words that I’m likely to use!
Have a go and see what your crutch/most popular words are… it’s fun!
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