Once you have a substantial text, it’s time to look at it closely and hone the prose and make the formatting clear. Sentences should have variation in length and grammatical structure. You want your dialogue formatted consistently. Section or chapter breaks, too. You will inevitably be reevaluating the large structure, too. There are many tips and tools on this site to help with all of those, but this one is about getting an outside look to help you find flaws that are by definition almost invisible to you: your own verbal tics and ruts.

These may take the form of small language tics that you use frequently. Words or constructions that you default to, when a variation might provide a better reading experience. They aren’t cliches in the usual sense of being phrases that are so overused in the culture that they have lost their freshness and meaning — they’re specific to your voice. The goal would be to observe how you express things, and make sure you’re not repeating things — whether words, constructions or ideas — excessively.

There is an online tool called Voyant that I like for searching out what I call these “internal clichés.” I recently ran it on something I’ve written and discover I had used the word just 70 times. I was then able to look at each construction with just in a list and decide which of them to eliminate. Now, I think hard every time that work pops out of my keyboard.

Voyant can also generate a word cloud, which will help you see your most commonly used phrases and words — a great tool for thinking about your themes and for honing your prose — and several other ways of seeing your text. There are also free add-on world cloud generators in many apps, including Google Docs.

Try it, and see if it helps you make line edits and eliminate repetition or internal cliché, or just become more aware of your habits of diction.

https://voyant-tools.org/