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);
alt="Wordle: Written in Stone"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd">
- Log in to post 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."
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!
Looking forward to it.
Now, there I was, thinking you just *really* liked evolution... ;-)
I wish there was a visual equivalent that could collage images together...
Looking forward to the book!
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.
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.
... and hopefully I'll do a better with job with grammar when I start writing it than what I just posted here. ;-o