I've been working on polishing another manuscript before trying to get it published, and as I near the end of a first read-through, I thought I would post information about a great tool I found for editing. At one time, I considered how I would write a program to do this, but then I found a website which offered exactly what I wanted for free!
It's from the site of Roger J. Carlson where in his TechTips section, he offers tools for editing. My favorite is the Word Frequency Counter. You can list words in your manuscript you do NOT want to count, but then the program runs through the whole book and counts how many times each word is used and how close together they appear. For example, if you used the word "seriously" fifteen times and the closest they appear is six words apart, you might want to take a look at that word (using the find function of your word processor). Editors, publishers, and agents jump all over repetition of words.
And speaking of editing, there's a book I found some time ago called "Write In Style" by Bobbie Christmas of Zebra Communications. It's a small book with a lot of information about editing. Her free download articles have a lot of value too. Here's the link: Bobbie Christmas at Zebra Editor.
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