A NOVEL ABACUS

Novel Wizard is a cleaned-up version of an unoptimized mess of an app I made years ago.  I've been actively writing since 2012 and, though I no longer write epic fantasy, I do crunch a number of words into TTRPG systems and visual novels.

This application is a GUI version of the process I would go through with my writing works until I built up the muscle memory to refrain from inserting certain filler words.

TYPE TOKEN RATIO

Type Token Ratio is a value from 0-1 that is one way of ranking writing ability.  It measures the frequency of unique words in a sentence.  TTR is commonly rated against a single paragraph, but I formatted this program to rate an entire body of work.  So, go nuts!

FILLER WORDS

One of the most valuable lessons I learned in writing fiction was this:

If you can say the same thing with 1 word instead of 2, it's better for everyone 95% of the time.

Filler words are words that fresh authors put in that often don't need to be there.  Some filler words are necessary, like how sometimes the author needs to just tell the audience information instead of showing them ('show don't tell' is a good guideline for most things in writing).

I found that comparing my work to authors I admire as a baseline helped me get to a similar level of filler word frequency.  I'm not at their level, but it did help my writing.

USAGE

Paste your story in the appropriate block.  You can also paste a story to compare to.  The longer the text, the more accurate the numbers will be.

You can also output to a CSV spreadsheet, which you can use to search for said occurrences of words and see which ones you want to delete/change in your document.

BACKUP your written work, as always!