Editing Your Own Draft With a Word-Frequency Report: A Practical Walkthrough
By Mohak Mangal · Published October 26, 2026 · 6 min read
Nearly every first draft has the same disease: you lean on a handful of words without noticing. "Really", "very", "important", "just", the product name, a pet phrase. You read it back and it seems fine, because your brain smooths over the repetition. A frequency report doesn't get smoothed. It shows you the habit as a number.
Step 1: run the count on a finished draft
Don't do this while you're writing. Get the thing out first, then analyse. Paste the text into the keyword and phrase analyzer, leave the stop-word filter on, and look at three things: total words, the top single words, and the top two-word phrases.
Step 2: what to look for
- Filler words in the top ten. If "really" or "actually" sits near the top, delete most of them. Almost no sentence gets worse.
- One phrase that dominates. Your topic phrase should appear regularly, but if it shows up in every other sentence, you'll sound like a brochure. Replace some with "it", "this approach", or a more specific noun.
- Missing words you expected. If you're writing about soil health and "compost" never appears, perhaps you skipped something readers will want.
- Odd repeated bigrams such as "in order to", "a lot of", "kind of". These are small, fixable tics.
Step 3: a small example
Here's the type of sentence that gets flagged:
It is very important to water your plants. Watering your plants regularly is really important because plants that are watered regularly grow better.
The counts show "plants" four times, "important" twice, "regularly" twice, plus "very" and "really" doing nothing. A rewrite:
Water on a steady schedule. Plants that never dry out between drinks grow noticeably better.
Twenty-eight words became fifteen, the meaning survived, and it reads more like a person talking. The report didn't write that for you; it just pointed at where to look.
Reading the other numbers
- Reading time. Roughly 200 words a minute is a standard estimate. If your "quick tip" article says 14 minutes, it isn't one.
- Unique-word ratio. A very low ratio in a long piece suggests repetition. A very high one in a short piece is normal and not a sign of quality by itself.
- Sentence count against word count. Divide words by sentences. An average above 25 usually means dense, tiring text; between 12 and 20 is comfortable for most web writing.
What not to do with it
Don't hunt for a magic percentage. There's no official keyword-density target, and chasing one produces stilted writing. And don't use synonyms mechanically to dodge repetition: if the repeated word is the right word, keep it. The goal is natural writing for readers. The count is just a mirror. For the longer discussion, see our piece on keyword density.
A five-minute editing routine
- Finish the draft and leave it alone for an hour, or overnight if you can.
- Run the report. Circle the top three offenders.
- Search the document for each and decide, case by case, whether to cut, replace or keep.
- Read it aloud. Wherever you stumble, rewrite.
- Run the report once more to confirm that the habit has loosened.
It's humble, mechanical advice. But the people whose writing seems effortless usually have a routine like this behind it.