Numbers as Promised!

 

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The other day, I ran a word count check on "eyes," which seems to consistently be the most overused word in all of my manuscripts to date. The result? 457 eyes.

To put this in perspective, let me offer you some other numbers.

My book is 99,616 words and 335 double spaced pages (Times New Roman, 12pt Font).


This means there are, on average, 1.4 pairs of eyes per page in my manuscript. The word "eyes" makes up about .04% of my novel. That's less than half a percent, and when I look at it like that, I feel a little bit better.


Still! I felt it would be prudent to take out some of those extra eyeballs, so as I continued my revisions, I started replacing them as I came upon them in the text. I'm happy to report that I brought the number down to 433-- and I'm not quite half way through the book. Obviously there will need to be a second cutting, later, but I'll take what I can get.


The word just above eyes in frequency is "The" with a capital T (483), and "but" has tied eyes for usage. I was surprised there wasn't more "but" until I realized that there's an additional tally of 290 uses of the word "But." Maybe I should be more concerned about B(b)ut.


In contrast, I use the names of my primary characters Eve (388), Adam (296), Thor (259), Reu (209), and Garrit (195) far less.

In case you're wondering, the word "back" comes in at 374, with "could," "them," and "me," buffering it against Eve. There will be some search and replace in the future for "back."

The top scoring word? "the" lowercase, with over 4000 uses. 4% of my manuscript.

Yowza. Those articles really take up a lot of word count real estate.

Some other words of note:
looked--170
love--124
smiled--100
stared--72
nodded--59
shrugged--19

By the way, if you don't see me around the blogosphere in the next couple of days, it's because I've banned myself from the internet to finish revising 24 chapters in less than a week. If major progress does not get made, I may have to skip my Friday blogpost--so savor the statistics! And also, feel free to check out your own! What's your "eyes" equivalent?

For the Insatiable, Most Common Words from "the" to "The" in The Book of Generations:


the    4046
to    3034
her    2902
and    2558
of    1625
his    1613
was    1365
you    1277
she    1260
he    1255
it    1147
a    1145
had    1114
I    1095
She    1082
in    1033
that    994
He    926
him    869
for    728
with    697
as    688
not    666
at    650
be    622
from    617
would    613
have    531
The    483