My Word Count Review

I am editing a manuscript for a fellow writer at the moment, and when I sent her a rather detailed report of overused words…she was intrigued.

She asked me what I use to get that report. I told her, and sent her to the site.

And then I thought, I've used this for ages now, and I've never reviewed it.

So here goes.

MyWordCount by MyWriterTools

Here are the details from the product page:

myWordCount facilitates examining your documents for word, phrase, and sentence usage. This phrase and word frequency counter is extremely helpful to help find repetitive words and phrases, or long sentences. The program makes it easy to:

Word frequency counter. Count the usages of every word in your document. Quickly sort the list by word or usage count. You can then select any word and highlight all occurrences of that word in the document.
Phrase frequency counter. Count the usages of every 2, 3, 4, or 5-word phrase in your document. Quickly sort the list by phrase or usage count. You can then select any phrase and highlight all occurrences of that phrase in the document.
Sentence start phrase counter. Count the usages of every 1, 2, or 3-word phrase used at the start of each sentence in your document. Quickly sort the list by phrase or usage count. You can then select any phrase and highlight all occurrences of that phrase in the document.
Sentence length counter. Count all sentences and produce a graph of all sentence usage by sentence length. You can then view the document and easily find long sentences or sentences that are similar in length near each other.
Produce a printed report off all tables of word and phrase usage, including the sentence length graph.
New version now reads RTF files, websites or pasted text, in addition to MS Word files.

Requirements

- Microsoft Word 2000 or later (including 2007) for reading Word files

- Windows 2000 or later (including Vista)

- Screen Resolution of 800×600 or greater.

I will show you what we are talking about.The opening screen. (Click the images to see a bigger version)

Here you see what you get. It's not just a word counter.

It's an analysis tool. And a pretty darn good one.

You have screens for various areas, like Phrases and Sentences, and Words.

Let's open a document.

As you can see, you can open all manner of documents. RTF, HTML, Word — or you can paste your text if you want to.

For this review, I chose an old, unedited, very badly written, unfinished story of mine.

Here I've clicked on "Count Words" and I've filtered out "Satara", as it's a name and I don't want to count that one. It'll be there a lot.

You can click on any of the count headers to sort. I tend to go for 4 letters or more, since (as you can see) I use "That" a lot.

I don't recommend using 3 letters, as you then end up with "The" a lot. It does make you miss "Had" though, so you might want to do it anyway and filter out the ones you don't want to count. The number of letters (and various other things) can be changed in "Options".

If you use "Graph Highlighted Word" it will open the document with all of them highlighted and a legend as to what you're looking at.

It looks like this:

You can see all the red highlighted "That" occurrences are within 50 words of another "That".

Easy to weed them out this way. If you click on the bar in the graph, it takes you to the word.

You get the same functionality for Phrases and Sentence starts.

Here you see what the Phrases look like. Again, it's sortable, it's broken up into 2-5 word phrases, and you can graph it just like the Words view.

Next we have the Sentence starts:

Same game as Words and Phrases. I advise to use the sort functionality, because sometimes you may not use a phrase within 50 words, but you might use it 30 times in the manuscript in total. Great for finding clichés or overused phrases!

Now we get to the Sentence Length tab.

I love that one.

Click on Analyze…and this is what you get:

You can easily see when you have very long sentences.

It tells me my longest sentence is 34 words. That's fine, and I don't have to worry about it.

But often I find sentences that are 40+ words, and that's getting just a tad long. It's something to look at.

When you close the window, you get a nifty graph:

While it's not really anything to worry about, it's fantastic for weeding out some stray overlong sentences.

Seeing the graph like this actually gives me the warm and fuzzies. Shorter (within reason) sentences are easier to read and understand, and will therefore not confuse the reader.

So now that we did all that… What can you do with it?

First of all, you can save those results:

You can do: Top 10 – 100 words, Top 5 – 20 Phrases and Sentence Starts. All of them include a none / all option too.

I tend to go for the Top 10.

Hit save analysis and it will prompt you for a location to save the file.

And if you want to see what you get:

Review-Analyse PDF

You get this as a word document or an RTF. I've converted to PDF for display purposes.

So there you have it. I would not be without this nifty little tool, and my review was long overdue.

If you want to grab your own copy, you can find it here: