A quick observation about rereading your own work.

[larkin]

I ran my short story Americano through SmartEdit. (1,943 words)

Adverbs:

really-4 only-2 carefully absolutely heavily personally certainly (1 each)

Selected Repeated Words:

Owen-16 #1 the protagonist's name, Donna-15 #2 the secondary character's name, that's-10 #5, I'm-9 #7, it's-9 #8, like-8 #10, when-6 #18

Clichés:

Oh my God (the only cliché)

Dialogue Tags (Real ones, not just nearby words where there was no dialogue tag):

said (3)

Sentence Start List:

I-14 He-12 The-10 I'm-7 Owen-7 That's-6 Yes-5 Now-5 It's-5 My-5 She-5

Then I ran through my latest novel, A Time When it All Went Wrong through SmartEdit (the 18 chapters that have been posted). It has 70,470 words. What's most notable:

Adverbs with usage counts 10 and over:

really-49 only-44 probably-38 exactly-37 actually-36 especially-18 mostly-14 finally-11

Repeated words that aren't names or titles with usage counts 200 and over:

like-373 when-260 it's-253 that's-237 going-210 don't-210

Redundancies:

absolutely sure (2) and four others I used once each

Monitored words:

that-851 then-284 just-182 ("that" is 1.2% of the words in this story, and includes the 237 "that's" as well)

Possible profanity:

12 swear words with a total of 29 uses; the most popular are hell and shit at 7 times each, but if you add bullshit and shitty it ups the "excrement" family to 10 times.

Dialogue tags (again, real ones):

said-402 asked-152 told-65 replied-52

Sentence Start List (125 and over):

I-931 We-222 He-203 You-173 The-167 Todd-149 That's-133

Very interesting. I'm definitely going to have to look for "that" "then" and "just" in this story and decide what can be excised.

Colin

That impresses me as being nothing short of a vivisection.

Definition: Vivisection, the activity or practice of doing scientific or medical experiments on live animals.

[colinian]

That impresses me as being nothing short of a vivisection.

Definition: Vivisection, the activity or practice of doing scientific or medical experiments on live animals.

Or self-mutilation. (Ugh!)

Colin