AcademyOfFetishes
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Vacation update: Echoing headwords
🕑 Added 2017-11-26 02:18:41 +0000 UTCHi! I'm having a great vacation. So far I've been able to work on the game a little bit each night, but it's very challenging because I'm with friends and don't have much privacy. Someone could walk in at any time! So, how can I add value if I can't really concentrate enough to write new scenes?
Well, I was skimming /r/writingand a comment pointed me to this blog article: https://creativityhacker.ca/2015/12/01/51-things-that-break-reader-immersion/ That's where I learned about a term called Echoing headwords:
Using the same word or phrase to start successive sentences, paragraphs, or even chapters.
This is a bad thing because you start noticing the repetition instead of the information they're conveying. In other words, echoing headwords break immersion. I always knew this was a bad thing, but I also know I make this mistake in my writing a lot.
So, I've been going over my content and trying to rewrite any sentences that have echoing headwords. It's nice because I can stop at any time and still feel like I've made an improvement.
The hardest part is finding the echoing headwords. I've got 160k+ words to look through. Actually, this would be the hardest part but I made it really easy. The first thing I did was write a script that finds and highlights the echoing headwords in sentences. Now all I have to do is scroll through my files and look for the bright yellow. Pretty nifty if I do say so myself. I don't know how I could do this with any other editor than vim so it's really starting to pay off!
So far I've been pleasantly surprised: I don't make this mistake as frequently as I suspected. Sometimes I make the mistake 2/3 times in a scene. But, on rarer occasions, some scenes have large clusters of the issue.
Anyway, once I fix all this it may be worthy of a minor release.
