Always check your word usage–it can make the difference between a good story and a mediocre one. Always question your overused phrases, because a lot of time, you can find a better way to express yourself.Ī great use of this tool is to use it for every one of your Scrivener scenes individually, and then use it for your entire manuscript overall before submitting to a publisher or finalizing your draft. Now while each of these words has its own nuances and should be used in proper situations, checking out every usage of “glance” in your story allows you to reevaluate whether “glance” is needed at all, or if the sentence could be rephrased entirely or deleted. For example, what’s another word for “glance?” You could use gaze, peek, glimpse, etc. There are novels I have read that have removed me from the story simply by the overuse of a certain word.Īlthough you want to use words that are natural for your story and your own vocabulary (don’t try to write “above” your normal vocabulary as a general rule), a thesaurus can be a great additional tool to mix it up. Sometimes it really is that much of a difference. Why is this such a great tool for a writer? Word repetition can make the difference between an easy to read document or story and one that has the reader distracted by one word. Likewise, if you wish to keep the list alphabetical because you’re looking for a certain word in a large document, then click on Word above the first column. Quick tip: to sort your words via Frequency, just click on the word Frequency above the title. Instead, you should focus on those overused words that top your list. For example, below my “favorite” word is “the.” Sure I could go through and try to get rid of some of those, but it probably wouldn’t be worth your time. Now in writing, a lot of words are invisible and those are actually going to be your most used word. That little button that shows a box with what looks like a bar graph… yep. Go ahead and click it–you know you want to. Maybe it’s a lot, and you can go through the document page by page and figure it out.īut what if you had something that showed you all the words in your document–and how often you used each one? It just takes one click… (There I go with “just” again.) How often do you use the word “just”? Sure, you could do a search and find in Word and it’ll tell you exactly how many words it finds with “just” in it. One of the many reasons that I love Scrivener is the plethora of cool tools that it offers the writer.Ī writer can often get distracted by these “extra” tools, but the ones in Scrivener are well worth the time spent.ĭid you know that the program has Text Stats for you to peruse your most used words?
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