Duplicate Word Finder: Find & Fix Repeated Words

Why Use This Tool?

Writers utilize this tool to edit their blog entries and articles, students use it to proofread their homework, editors use it to check for poor writing and even casual users benefit from this tool. You could write an important email and want to impress the reader. You could write a resume and try to keep it fresh. In short, this duplicate word checker was designed for anybody that writes. Here’s what it corrects:

• Amount of accidental word repetition: the same word showing up in an individual section more than once.
• Weak verb use: utilizing too many filler words such as “very” or vague phrases such as “good”.
• Consistently flat toned sentences: starting your paragraph with an equivalent of “The” or “This” multiple times.
• Reader exhaustion from continually saying the same phrases.

Some Examples of Who Would Benefit From It:

• Students looking for overused words in their projects.
• Bloggers that want to compose a clearer version of their work with different words used.
• Editors considering how to edit drafts quickly.
• Content writers that adhere to SEO standards or style guides.
• Anyone doing a final review of their work.

How It Works

Here’s how it goes down, step-by-step:

• You enter (paste) your text into the little box
• The tool does an analysis on every word in the text and counts how many times each word occurred
• All of the duplicate words get assigned their own color highlight, so for example if the word “simple” is found in that text 4 times, every occurrence of the word “simple” will receive the same highlight color. This makes it simple to visually quickly identify duplicate words within your text.
• Each list does show the count of all of the duplicate words along with their color in the text itself. And you do have the ability to adjust the minimum number of characters in a word to search out duplicate words using the slider bar located on the right side of the screen
• In addition, you can upload a .txt text file into the program that will identify duplicate words instead of copying your text into the program from the clipboard. You can copy the results to your own computer or save them as a .txt file

Limitations to Know

This tool’s purpose is to find duplicate/repeated words; there are a few limitations:

• First, it will only work with .txt files. It cannot process .pdf or .docx file formats.
• Second, this tool will treat the words ‘run’ and ‘running’ as different words, so all variations of the same word will not be grouped together.
• Third, capitalized versions of words such as “Apple” and lowercase versions (i.e., “apple”) will be considered the same word.
• Fourth, shorter words such as ‘a,’ ‘in,’ and ‘of’ may be overrepresented in reports; you may want to use the slider option when reviewing the report to remove these words.
• Fifth, the tool will not provide any type of spelling, grammar, nor sentence structure checking; it will find repeated (duplicate) words only.

Remember that this tool is only to help with writing and cannot provide the complete solution for editing. Use your best judgment to interpret the result of this tool.

It’s much easier to write if you have a clear view of the issues. The repeated word tool gives you the option of looking at the repeated word in front of you so that when you are editing your work, you no longer have to guess what to change. I would highly recommend using this tool on your next piece of writing and seeing what a difference it makes.