A Study on the overuse of Certain Words
I am working on a new post, which could be one of my last posts. It is still in progress. One of the things that English teachers use to evaluate a paper is the overuse of certain words. Back in the day, that would usually be just a red circle on certain words that were overused. With the advent of modern word processors, that is easy by just searching for a specific word in a written document. Use the find function and enter the word and it will return the number of times that word is in the document. Some psychologist who would suggest the overuse of words indicates one's highest priority. I do not think that I would agree with that. After all, certain things just occur often in the regular discourse of human affairs. Take for instance the use of the blank space " " used to separate words. I have used 19,140 blank spaces in my comments. If I deleted all the blank spaces, the comments would be almost unreadable. (Hey, I heard that) One of the other most overused things is the common period "."(1171). However, in the interest of being fair and balanced, I have used the MS word's other look up. It is the Thesaurus. It suggest replacing I with the following: myself, me, I myself, I for one, I personally, and yours truly. Come on now, does that really solve the 'I' problem? I have made 178 comments so far on BCN. That is 19,464 words Here is an index of my most overused words. I am still looking for more often repeated words. I think I may have the priorities just about right. (18 "I"'s just in this post, 21 if you include the count list) WORD COUNT NOT INCLUDING THIS POST Bass-1, Clarkston-3, Conservative-9, Dad-12, Emory-26, Family-10, Hate-6,I-379, Liberal-18, Libertarian-4, Me-38, Mom-3, Money-3, My-119, Vietnam-23. ![]()
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