This is just cool…

So, I was reading a blog post over at Addicted to Books and I came across this awesome tool.  It’s a site that allows you to go in and enter your ms and then it makes this word cloud for you.  The bigger the word, the more it’s used.  Obviously, I have an MC.  Anyway, the other thing it does is to give you a list of every single word and how many times you used it.  I glanced through the entire list and was pleasantly surprised.  Any word that I’d really used a lot was “a” or “and” or something like that.  After all the editing I did to cut overused words, that made me happy (not that there aren’t a few words I could still cut — as a beta recently pointed out).

Another tip Angie had in that same post was to highlight all the “-ly” in the entire manuscript.  Then you can see if there are too many adverbs.  Now, this does include a lot of words like family and only and stuff, but it does work for the adverbs too.  What a great idea for editing.  She has a few others if you want to go check it out.