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Archives for Writing
Better Than a Substitute Teacher
Maureen Dowd is on book leave at the New York Times and Sarah Vowell is filling in.
The Illiterates Have Taken Over
Today Slashdot published the most poorly constructed sentence ever written in the history of the English language:
Some people thought [this post][1] was cool, so I wrote [this quick and dirty web app][2]. Special thanks to [Tim Lee][3] for testing and writing the documentation. [1]: /archives/016325.php [2]: /wordcounter/ [3]: http://www.binarybits.org/Lots of discussion going on about ‘folksonomies’ — bottom-up taxonomies that people create on their own — as used in Del.icio.us and Flickr: Adam Mathes has a thesis on Folksonomies; IFTF’s Future Now makes a point about problems with folksonomies: no synonym control ( “mac” and “macintosh” on Del.icio.us); no hierarchy and content types; and only simple one-word tags.
I figured it would be a good idea to consciously identify and excise some of the non-descriptive words I tend to lean on in my writing. To accomplish this, I wrote a [quick script][1] to cycle through all my blog posts and rank the words I use by their respective frequency of occurrence.
In case you’re interested, here are my top 100 words followed by the number of times they occur:
1. the (2008)
2. a (1166)
3. to (1094)
4. i (876)
5. of (872)
6. and (681)
7. in (555)
8. it (438)
9. is (381)
10. that (372)
11. on (369)
12. for (369)
13. my (315)
14. was (308)
15. you (269)
16. with (251)
17. this (239)
18. from (226)
19. be (213)
20. at (212)
21. an (199)
22. as (169)
23. have (157)
24. by (151)
25. they (142)
26. he (141)
27. all (138)
28. it’s (137)
29. like (134)
30. me (125)
31. just (123)
32. we (122)
33. i’m (118)
34. are (118)
35. new (117)
36. when (114)
37. up (113)
38. out (111)
39. will (111)
40. so (107)
41. one (106)
42. can (104)
43. would (102)
44. not (101)
45. but (99)
46. his (97)
47. about (96)
48. has (93)
49. what (91)
50. if (88)
51. or (88)
52. com (85)
53. get (82)
54. which (81)
55. last (79)
56. really (79)
57. who (77)
58. i’ve (76)
59. there (75)
60. think (74)
61. now (73)
62. some (70)
63. their (70)
64. don’t (69)
65. been (69)
66. people (67)
67. more (67)
68. had (66)
69. do (66)
70. over (66)
71. were (65)
72. today (64)
73. than (63)
74. very (62)
75. time (61)
76. them (60)
77. your (60)
78. good (59)
79. any (58)
80. should (56)
81. her (56)
82. our (56)
83. she (54)
84. actually (53)
85. how (53)
86. no (53)
87. two (51)
88. see (51)
89. him (51)
90. even (51)
91. only (50)
92. seems (50)
93. could (50)
94. bq (50)
95. much (49)
96. first (49)
97. erin (48)
98. while (48)
99. few (48)
100. years (48)
[1]: /wp-content/uploads/downloads/mt-crutchwords.txt
A Modest Proposal
I’ve heard a lot of pseudo-academics complaining about the negative effects of word processors on our collective ability to understand the writing process. They often bemoan the fact that we no longer have records of revisions. A modest proposal:
Writers should use CVS. The log functions would allow explanations of the motivations behind edits. Upon completion of a project, a complete record would exist in the CVS repository of the artistic process, from beginning to end.
