AS I read a bit of fan-fic, the word AS attracted my attention. That should not happen. Common words should "go without saying," they should be invisible. I decided to do some analysis - note the word "anal" within "analysis," what a lovely pun. For comparison I picked on three chapters of a W.I.P. - I might have used someone else's work, but mine was handy...lol. Some figures on mine are not quite as accurate because of some extra stuff in the page (my habit of writing everything as a webpage), but the sample is larger so it doesn't go off more than a fraction of a percent.
I put in some of the other items because they are good indicators of how much polishing has been or needs to be done (aside from things making sense altogether).
Observed frequency of "as" documentation, with a shameful exposé of commatosity:
| AS usage comparison | ||
|---|---|---|
| A fan-ficker, one post ~ Total Words: 2502 | ||
| Word or punctuation |
Frequency | % |
| , | 169 | 5.74 |
| . | 164 | 5.57 |
| the | 112 | 3.80 |
| " | 42 | 1.7 |
| as | 33 | 1.12 |
| Me - | ||
| 1 - Total Words: 6953 | ||
| . | 728 | 8.00 |
| , | 324 | 3.76 |
| the | 285 | 3.31 |
| " | 280 | 3.25 |
| as | 38 | 0.44 |
| 2 - Total Words: 5139 | ||
| as | 13 | 0.19 |
| 3 - Total Words: 5382 | ||
| as | 22 | 0.31 |
Note that your humble critic uses less than half as many as-es as the writer whose very enjoyable work was picked on as an example. It is good to be aware of one's "as" usage. It gets thrown in a lot where "since" or "because" or "while" might serve better. It gets monotonous as well as rather vague.
Periods lead in all of my own samples, as they should. Comma dominance indicates poor sentence structure. Long, run-on, comma-spliced sentences make difficult reading and just generally drag ass.
"The" is always the most numerous word. My first chapter has a marvelously low "the" count, dunno how I managed it, usually end up closer to 4%. Anything over 4% seems to indicate too much expository crap. A high percentage of quotation marks merely indicates that there is a lot of dialogue. That is a good thing because it livens up the story and means that the narrator does not hog the scene (i.e. "telling" rather than "showing"). One must describe and explain to some extent, but the characters should be allowed act it out as much as possible. Even if they don't talk a lot, they should show their emotions and thoughts - and I don't mean head-hopping!
NoteTab was used for the word counts.
Gad, there's a lot of as-es on this page!