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A collection of snippets of the books I write and, occasionally, my life and the things that inspire my writing...

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Writing Tools: The Writer's Diet

"Owly" over at "Letter Go" found a really useful writer's tool. The Writer's Diet

Visitors to the page paste in up to 1,000 words of their work, and it then generates feedback based on word usage. It targets specific areas of writing--namely, verbs, nouns, prepositions, adjectives/adverbs, and it/this/that/there.  It's meant to help a writer get rid of unnecessary words.

My personal opinion?  It is helpful. Not a panacea for writing ills, but a tool in the writer's arsenal.  It's a new set of eyes on the things a writer is blind to: his own work. It highlights things that might be bettered if changed--or eliminated.

You don't have to register, and it's free. You might find it useful--you might think it's a waste of time. Either/or, here's the link:  The Writer's Diet Test When the results come back, remember to scroll down to see the highlighted words in your text. It's easy to miss since it's below screen level until you scroll down.

The disclaimer on the website:

ATTENTION USERS: Please note that the Writers Diet Test is an automated feedback tool, not an assessment tool. The test identifies some of the sentence-level grammatical features that most frequently weigh down academic prose. It is not designed to judge the overall quality of your writing — or anyone else's.

Happy dieting ;-)



4 comments:

  1. Sounds intriguing! Might check it out sometime if only for a bit of fun!

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    1. Hi Suzanne, it is fun. And it was interesting, too. Thanks for visiting! :-)

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  2. Yeah, I think it's easy to expect too much out of automated tools... as hard as programmers try, we can't get computers to really understand language the way we humans use it. (Maybe when they can, we should be afraid of them.)

    Your name is Teresa and here is your cupcake! http://www.flickriver.com/photos/hello_naomi/1470228121/

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    1. True that, "(Maybe when they can, we should be afraid of them.)". It is a fun site. :-) Thanks for visiting, and for the cupcake! Too funny! :-)

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