Prose checks › Repeated words Pro
Prose check: repeated words nearbyThe lantern, the lantern, the lantern.
Use a word, and a sentence later use it again, and the reader hears an echo. Sometimes that’s the point. Usually it isn’t. Falcontext finds these repeated words in your narration.
In Falcontext’s Edit tab, Repeated words nearby is one part of Repeated and crutch words, with your crutch words. Each part has its own light, and the worst sets the check’s.
What counts as a repeat
The same word twice within a few sentences, in any of its forms: looked and looking count as one.
What it leaves alone
Names. “Said” and “asked”. And the 500 words fiction uses most (look, eyes, door): nobody notices those twice. Dialogue isn’t counted either.
How many is normal?
My first guess for this one made every published book I tried red. So I measured. The middle book of the 38 had 8.8 repeats per 1,000 words; three in four had 10.3 or fewer; the most had 21.3.
Where these numbers come from.
How Falcontext checks repeated words
Guidelines, not rules. An echo can be music. This makes you aware of the ones you didn’t mean.
- Finds
- The same word, or its forms, twice within a few sentences of narration, each pair marked in your text.
- Traffic light
- Up to 10 per 1,000 words
- Up to 15
- More than 15
Fixing one is usually a pronoun, a cut, or a better word for the second time round.
Echoes are easiest to fix once the sentences are settled, which is why they’re in the words pass of the self-editing guide, after the sentences pass.
Which word keeps coming back in your drafts?
Questions about repeated words.
How close is “nearby”?
Within a few sentences of each other. Further apart, a reader doesn’t hear the echo.
Are names counted as repeated words?
No. Names come back all the time and should. So do “said” and “asked”, and the 500 most common words in fiction: none of them are counted.
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