Laelaps is the blog of freelance science writer 
For months now I have been hammering away at individual chapters of my first book, Written in Stone, but this weekend I finally put all the individual parts together into one document. I still have a lot of editing to do, but it still feels good to move past the stage of large-scale construction and get down to fine tuning.
With the greater body of work properly arranged I could hardly resist creating a Wordle cloud for the book. For those unfamiliar with Wordle, it is an online program that will scan through a body of text and pick out the most frequently used words and display them in a multicolored jumble. They are fun to make, but I also find them to be useful. If I have employed particular words too much, "however" being the one I am most prone to overuse, they will probably show up in the word cloud and I can be more mindful of my word use.
So here it is, a bird's eye view of Written in Stone by way of the 250 most-used terms in the book as it is today (click through for the full-sized image);
Comments
Uh oh...
"Like, we know evolution happened because, like, mammals and other animals have, like, left a fossil record that shows their evolution over many years."
Posted by: TR Gregory | November 28, 2009 1:07 PM
Haha, thankfully it is not that bad! Unfortunately in the rough draft I often employed "like" in place of "such as" when mentioning particular creatures that lived during particular times (i.e. "early synapsids like..."). I was aware of that little tick before, but the word cloud has driven it home, and I am hoping that in the next iteration "like" will be much less prominent!
Posted by: Laelaps | November 28, 2009 1:11 PM
Looking forward to it.
Posted by: TR Gregory | November 28, 2009 2:14 PM
Now, there I was, thinking you just *really* liked evolution... ;-)
Posted by: OmegaMom | November 28, 2009 8:04 PM
I wish there was a visual equivalent that could collage images together...
Looking forward to the book!
Posted by: Glendon Mellow | November 28, 2009 10:23 PM
What an excellent tool! I've bookmarked it in my 'Writing Tools' menu. Using a crutch phrase is one of the big problems in writing, something even experienced authors fall prey to. Although the word cloud won't help with stand-out phrases you use a few times, and because of their noticability they jar the reader's mind, it will help immensely with more mundane naughty repetitions.
Posted by: Nadia Williams / Anida Adler | November 29, 2009 4:09 AM
I've used Wordle before, but never thought about using it as a self-edit tool. I recently had a book proposal accepted by a univ. press, and I'll have to keep that in mind as I begin the adventure of writing book.
Posted by: DeLene | November 29, 2009 9:07 AM
... and hopefully I'll do a better with job with grammar when I start writing it than what I just posted here. ;-o
Posted by: DeLene | November 29, 2009 9:10 AM