This week’s Scrivener Saturday: Word Count, Word Frequency, and more!
One of the most difficult parts of writing is making sure that you use variety in your word choice and avoid redundancy. To help with word choice and word frequency, Scrivener has a text statistics option which will not only give you general statistics about your project, but will tell you word frequency. If you see that you’ve used the word just 100 times in your chapter, that’s not a good sign! (See screenshot below.)
TIP #3: To get to the list, go to PROJECT –> TEXT STATISTICS. Once the screen comes up, just click on the down arrow next to Word Frequency to see the list.
What I love about this feature: Seeing which words I over use.
Humorous bit about this feature: Seeing how many times the word THE gets used.
Check out the whole series of posts here.
For a much more comprehensive (and free!) word frequency tool, check out the N-gram functionality in the program found at this link:
http://www.laurenceanthony.net/antconc_index.html
@Jon Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Scrivener works very well with the way my brain organizes information. As a writer, it does what I need in terms of categorizing and organizing research, webpages, etc. I haven’t found that I need a more comprehensive word frequency tool, truth be told, but it’s good to know that other programs are out there. (Scrivener is pretty darned cheap, too, considering the power it has, though free is often nicer!)
PSA for visitors: I would recommend though that any visitors here thoroughly research and google the linked tool above BEFORE downloading. Lots of free programs out there are little more than spyware or malware these days. I doubt that’s the case here, but knowing nothing about it or having heard of it before, would give me pause before downloading. 🙂