If you’ve ever tried to read a long article or academic paper with lots of footnotes, you know what I’m talking about here: The writing becomes heavy. It comes to a halt. Your mind stop processing ideas and instead starts making lists of acronyms, place-names and people names. And then your eyes glaze over. This […]

So maybe you read what you wrote and realize it’s familiar, only uncomfortably so. And the problem isn’t necessarily that you’re not a good writer. These same three word appear everywhere on the page. The thing is: Readers hardly ever notice repetition because our brains fill in blanks so well. That is why being able […]

Before you’re aware of what’s amiss, you read a manuscript and know there’s an issue. It’s not the plot, and it isn’t necessarily bad grammar; you just feel like the rhythm is off, like language is being used mechanicaly. If you take out all punctuation and look at raw frequency of words, you will see […]

I think most writers imagine that they have some kind of ear for when something is repeated. You read what you’ve written; your brain goes through the rhythm; if you like it, you guess that it’s original phrasing. That’s why there are tools called “five-gram frequency counters.” They wipe out your sense that you just […]