A writer’s best friend: The thesaurus

Using a thesaurus may seem like a no-brainer for most writers. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen writing that uses the same word over and over again. I’ve seen it in blog posts, fiction, essays and just about every other type of writing you can think of. I’m guilty of this myself, and have often been embarrassed by my writing when I see a word used countless times. To combat this problem, I’m relying more and more on the good ol’ thesaurus.

Thanks to technology and the power of the internet, you don’t even need to grab that dusty book off your shelf to get a list of synonyms for frequently used words. My favorite website for finding word definitions and possible synonyms to use is dictionary.reference.com. If you use Firefox, there’s a nifty little add-on that places a search box right on the lower corner of your browser – reducing the need for bookmarks.

What’s a good way to know when you’re using a word too much?

For me, a lot of it boils down to intuition. If I feel I’m using a word too much, then I’ll turn to the thesaurus to try to find alternatives. But sometimes it’s not that straightforward. In that case, I turn to other handy online tools, such as www.mytranslate.com/wordfrequency.

This tool allows you to paste in your text and then it will give you a rundown of how often the words in your writing are used. The only downside is common words like “the”,”a”,”and” and so forth are in the results. But it also shows the usage frequency of other words used in your writing – which can easily tell you, at a glance, if you need to open your thesaurus and which words need some special attention.

Is there a magic number to know when a word needs to be replaced with a synonym?

The short answer is no. It comes down to reading your work, and if it sounds awkward because a word is used too much, then you should probably think about fixing it. The frequency tool is just that, a tool. It won’t fix your writing or make it perfect, it’ll only give you an overview of your word usage.

I’ll give you an example of the word frequency in this post so you can see the type of results you can expect. Here’s the rundown:

Unique:195  Total:425
Freq.    Word
3    USING; 4   THESAURUS;  2   LIKE;  2   NO; 1   BRAINER; 5   FOR; 1   WRITERS; 3   BUT; 5   CAN; 2   TELL; 14   YOU

2    HOW; 2   TIMES; 2   SEEN; 6   WRITING; 6   THAT; 17   THE; 1   SAME; 9   WORD; 2   OVER; 11   AND; 1   AGAIN

11    IT; 7   IN; 1   BLOG; 2   JUST; 2   ABOUT; 3   OTHER; 2   TYPE; 12   OF; 2   THINK; 1   GUILTY; 4   THIS; 2   OFTEN

1    EMBARRASSED; 2   MY; 3   WHEN; 2   SEE; 5   USED; 1   COUNTLESS; 2   MORE; 2   GOOD; 4   NEED; 9   YOUR

1    SHELF; 2   SYNONYMS; 1   FREQUENTLY; 5   WORDS; 1   DICTIONARY; 1   REFERENCE; 2   THERE; 2   KNOW

3    TOO; 3   MUCH; 2   DOWN; 3   TOOL; 2   RUNDOWN; 2   RESULTS; 2   USAGE; 3   FREQUENCY; 2   WHICH

In the name of keeping the list somewhat short (and going easy on your eyes), I deleted a lot of the results where the word was only used once. But I also left a lot of the commonly used words (i.e. the, it, in, etc) in the results. Hopefully this will give you an idea of how a word frequency tool can help you avoid redundancy of using the same word over and over again.

For this post (not including these bottom paragraphs) there really is no one word I used so much that it warrants a trip to the thesaurus website. In the end, however, it just comes down to being conscious of your writing – especially during the revision phase.

How do you combat using the same words too frequently in your writing? Leave a comment below and share your answer.

Note: The word frequency tool I used differentiates between singular and plural words, so “word” and “words” are counted separately.

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