In looking to improve as a writer, paying close attention to the language I employ to craft my text is an essential exercise. I want to know more than just which words I’m using but also how to refine my language to create better, more diverse diction. To do this, I selected the complete texts of my undergraduate novel/graduation project and my masters thesis which was comprised of an introduction, a novella and five short stories. These two texts represent a wide swath of my creative catalog, both in terms of volume and the time span in which they were written. Sorting through these two, lengthy texts by simply implementing close reading strategies or manual documentation would have likely been time consuming, tedious and futile. To streamline the process, a method of visualization was necessary because it enables me to conceptualize my own work with little more than an initial glance or refining some of the parameters. Voyant seemed like an appropriate tool for providing this visualization due to its searchability and multiple forms of visualization–the wordle, highlighted text and charts. Upon opening the Voyant site, I first implemented the ‘stop word list’ to avoid commonly used words like “the,” “and” and others. My expectation was to use this filtering process so that I could get a more content-specific visualization.

Immediately, I identified trends visually through the wordle which made it easy for me to get a snapshot image of my word choice over the course of two texts. The larger words allowed me to identify them for their increased frequency, and I noticed right away that my most frequently used words were actually names. In assessing my intention as a writer of character-driven narratives, this suggests that if frequency corresponds with focus, than I was on the right track. However, the over use of any single word or concept diminishes its impact and emotional potential, so identifying this trend will allow me to be more conscious of my own tendencies and work to subvert them during the drafting process. Also, this trend could signify my efforts to present language that is specific and clear with the expectation of avoiding confusion; therefore, maybe this trend of heavily using character names is a positive contribution.

After excluding names, I wanted to identify trends regarding other words that I may have unknowingly overused. Again, my goal is to create a text that is diverse and engaging because it avoids redundancies. By charting the disparity between the most commonly used, non-name words in A Matter of Opinion (my undergraduate novel project completed in 2009) and Coming, Going, or Staying? (my masters thesis project that I completed in late 2012), I was able to determine that my frequency or repetitiveness has decreased. I view this as progress and confirmation of my own efforts to reduce redundancies and unoriginal forms of expression in my writing. This visualization, which was created by applying specific parameters, made it easier for me to understand my own tendencies without sinking several days worth of time, effort and focus into documenting it manually.

Finally, negative word usage diminishing suggests that my writing is taking on a more positive tone. This is a very broad generalization, but one that, from writing, I believed to be true but could not otherwise confirm. With the exception of the word “don’t” the appearance of negative verbs seems to be on the decline from my undergraduate text to my graduate work. Ultimately, I hope this is an indicator of my growth as a writing; however, another potential trend that is distressing is my reliance on overly simply verb selection, which I fear may make my writing less dynamic. As I continue to create new works of fiction, I can now be more conscious about selecting more active and dynamic words that could subtly inject energy into my writing.

Although I initially dismissed visualization tools like Voyant as calculators or data crunchers, employing the visualization allowed me to view my own work on a macro level, which should translate to me being able to improve it on a micro level. Ultimately, these conscious efforts at micro improvements through varying word choice should later be reflected in my macro assessments of my work in the future. These macro assessments could be interpreted as signifying stylistic and creative growth in my writing, so I am looking forward to collecting my future work and synthesizing it with the current results to identify even more advanced trends in my writing. I want to continue my growth as a writer and stylist, and I’ve never before considered using visualization tool to assess something as seemingly subjective as my creative process.