Visualising overused words

I discovered this website due to my day job, and realised it would be fun to paste my first novel in progress into it, and see what it generated.

It's a wordcloud, which calculates the frequency of words and makes oft-used ones bigger and less used words appear smaller.

Not sure if it has any actual real benefits, but there's a small chance it might highlight overused words in your novel.

http://www.wordle.net

 

I saw this website a while back, but I never thought of this application for it. The only concern I would have is whether they store the text, since an unpublished novel can be sensitive intellectual property.

For those of us who know how to code, this could be interesting to stick into a desktop application (though I suppose it would be relatively easy to do anyways, unless they have some special treatment of compound words).

On further reading:

I would still be a little wary of doing this with my own work, but it looks to be perfectly secure in that respect.

 

I have another one, might be a little old but it works understandably and even list the most used words and how many times you repeat them:
http://www.gaddy.fr/repetitiondetector/online.php?l=en
I like those kind of tools, they are not just fun but also very helpful.

 

Hmm... now I want to write a script/app that goes through and counts up all the instances of every word in a directory full of .rtf, .doc, or .docx files. I already did a more general word counter that has the ability to update my website with my current word count every time I save my work in Word.

 

There's plugins for Office Word

http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Word_Frequency.htm

 

I only have the starter version of Microsoft Office (reduced function word and excel) on my new laptop til my hubby goes to back to work (he's a construction worker). Will it work with the starter or do I have to wait until I get the full version?

 

Thanks for the link !....The gaddy was was colorful in 2000 words I used my slang dialect for a sexual act 12 times , How cool....brb need to top 20 out of 2k

 

I'm not sure about measuring frequencies of single words, although I've seen a critical analysis of one of the stories in Joyce's Dubliners that used the technique to identify possible subtexts.

I have used tools that have found recurring phrases, and the results were interesting. I wasn't sure whether I was identifying problems or just identifying my voice.

 

What did you use to measure the frequency of phrases? That sounds interesting.

 

I first did it with a tool I got from Giveaway of the Day, but I've long since forgotten the name of it and lost the
software. Now I can do it with a commercial tool called WordSmith
Tools which I bought when I was doing my English Language degree. The clusters are called n-grams; you'll find a few tools on the web.

 

Cool, thank you.