After a morning of chores, I'll be getting back to work on "Where Power Lies" some this afternoon. I started with looking at instances of the word "that", which the word frequency counter program shows was used 649 times. Lots of instances occur in dialog, and some of those can stay. My main focus is on those in narrative. The test is to read the sentence without the "that" and see if it means the same thing. If it does, the word goes.
Part of this process has the potential to introduce other instances of repetition. If I rewrite a sentence to get rid of "that," I might reuse another word in close proximity. I could probably run the word frequency counter a hundred times over and still wind up with too many uses of one word or another. That's why running programs--word counts, spelling, grammar--is not enough. Only careful proofreading will get even close to a perfect manuscript.
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