Now this the kind of diet I can do!

[next_to_normal]

For those of you who are writers, you may be interested in this fun link I found (via jongibbs): The Wasteline Test. It's a promotional thing for a book called The Writer's Diet, which I have not read, so I can't endorse it, but the test is pretty clever. It analyzes how lean your writing is by identifying problematic parts of speech and tells you if you're overdoing it in any areas, like too many adjectives or adverbs, "be" verbs, etc. You'll get an assessment in each word category and an overall assessment telling you whether or not you need to trim the fat from your writing.

I tried several different samples of my writing, and they all came out either lean or fit & trim, so clearly this test is brilliant. :) It kind of makes me want to test published authors and see how their stuff comes out.

Comments

[slaymesoftly]

LOL It was apparently designed for academic papers, so it seemed pointless to use fic for a sample. I used excerpts from two of the essays I did when starting RRU. I got three leans, one needs toning and one flabby.

Have you posted it at RRU? Might find some takers there too.

[next_to_normal]

Oh, I didn't realize it was for academic papers. The person I snagged it from is a genre fiction writer, and he thought it was useful, so I figured other authors might as well.

I did try running through a few of my meta posts, and I got one that needed toning, but the rest were as lean as my creative writing. :)