I spend a lot of time tweaking words in my stories – perhaps because in my heart I am a poet. I probably need to spend more time tweaking plot and character development! Be that as it may, here are three fun tools I like to use:
This tool will give you either a cloud of your most used words or a graph. Then you can visually see if you’ve overused any one particular strong word (especially problematical in very short stories) or if you have too many prepositions or passive language. I like to see many 1-count words, and I find it helpful to skim down and see my words as a list by frequency, rather than in sentences. (Free)
This tool is similar – paste in your text and you get a cloud of your words – but this generates ART. Yes, a pretty poster image of your story’s words – hit randomize a few times to see the various styles. I thought one story I pasted in generated a fabulous image of the story’s themes and feel.
You can even link to your website (or a single post) and perhaps get a sense of your personal theme, or the tone of your site. (Free)
I love this interactive thesaurus. You get a branching map of related words that you can expand by following the branches. You can also check the specific definition of each related word. (Free trial, then $20 per year)
LEE HALLISON 