Now THAT’s a Problem

Yesterday, my good friend, MissM, made a blog post about this program that she had run across on the internet.  It’s called AutoCrit and basically you feed your manuscript into it and it spits out a report about how awesome (or not) your writing is.  There’s a yearly subscription, but you can do a few things for free.

Last night I fed it the first 800 words of Going Home.  Words that I had read over and over and thought they were pretty good.  And they weren’t bad, but in those 800 words, I had used the word that 22 times.  That means that roughly every 36th word was ‘that.’  (In the previous sentence, I stuck in a ‘that’ that doesn’t need to be there.)  So I did a search of the 86,600 words that I have completed and ‘that’ appeared 1126 times.  That’s a bit better percentage, than my sample, but still a problem.  I went through my manuscript last night and took out 187 instances of that word.

I had no idea that I used that word so much.  It made me wonder if I talk like that.  And I wonder why I never noticed it before. Once it was out there, all highlighted in my manuscript, and I went back and read it, I could see that I really overuse it.  I put it places that it really isn’t necessary.  I guess that’s the kind of things that a professional editor would look for.

I wonder what other words I overuse.