Word repetition across a manuscript
Find the words and phrases you repeat without noticing
Every writer has them. A verb used four times on one page, a gesture every character makes, a phrase that turns up once a chapter for the length of the book.
- Distance matters
- Two uses a page apart is not the same as two in a line.
- Word forms grouped
- walked, walking and walks count together.
- Function words excluded
- "the" and "said" are meant to repeat.
Searching for a word you already suspect is easy. The problem is the words you do not suspect, and the ones spread thinly enough that no single page looks wrong. Counting the whole manuscript at once is the only way those surface.
Close echoes
The same word twice within about a sentence or two — near enough that a reader hears it even if the writer does not.
Crutch words
Words appearing far more often than the length of the text justifies, ranked by count so you can see the worst first.
Repeated sentence openers
Runs of consecutive sentences beginning with the same word, which flattens rhythm even when every sentence is fine on its own.
Phrases across the whole book
Multi-word phrases counted over every chapter, with the chapters each appears in.
How it goes
- 1
Upload the manuscript
The whole book in one file.
- 2
Read by category
Echoes are line-level. Crutch words and recurring phrases are book-level. They need different fixes.
- 3
Decide what stays
Repetition is a technique as often as an accident. Nothing is removed for you.
Questions
Can I not just use Find in Word?
For a word you already suspect, yes. Find cannot tell you which words you overuse, how close together two uses are, or which phrases recur across chapters, because you have to know what to search for first.
Does it count common words like "the"?
No. Function words, pronouns and speech verbs are excluded. Flagging "said" would make the report useless, since invisible repetition of "said" is correct craft.
What counts as too close?
Roughly a sentence or two. Wider windows produce hundreds of findings per chapter that no one reads; this threshold was set by running it against real manuscripts and looking at the volume.
Does it handle plurals and tenses?
Yes, conservatively. walked, walking and walks group together, while genuinely different words stay separate.