Using Unique Words

[gordo12]

I’ve never used Grammarly, or any similar program, and I doubt I ever will. But that’s personal choice and if other writers find it helpful why shouldn’t they use it? I like to rely on my own ability and, if in any doubt about something, I check with google. That doesn’t mean mistakes don’t slip through to a published story of mine but very few.

As the person who made the comment in which the word “discombobulated” was used I just want to clarify a couple of things Gordo seems to have misunderstood about what I wrote. After reading some comments on another thread I decided to read one of his stories and although the only category we have something in common is Romance I decided to read, for some unknown reason, his only story in Erotic Horror. I’ve copied my comment below and as you can see I gave it 5.

……….
“That was fun. . I don’t read horror stories or watch horror movies because I find them humorous and I know that’s not supposed to be the case. So for the first half of the story I was laughing and then the tone altered as she changed from the poor girl raped by the devil to becoming evil herself. The bit with the snake was revolting, which I’m sure you intended, and got your point across.

I did enjoy the story but, and I’m possibly/probably wrong, a sequel would have to be good and not turn out to be a cliche and detrimental to this story. I hope I’ve explained that correctly.

A few mistakes which an editor would have picked up on regarding using the wrong word, spelling and punctuation but nothing serious.

I never thought I’d see the word “discombobulated” in a story on this site for that.

Having dealt with the pro’s it’s only fair to deal with the con’s. I don’t come from the southern states but I have spent a lot of time there and have to agree with a previous comment in respect of “ya’ll” and the use of colloquial outside of speech, which kept interrupting my concentrating on reading.

But, on the whole, I did enjoy it and thought it worth a 5.”
……….

I think Gordo misunderstood when I wrote I never thought I’d see the word “discombulated” in a story on this site. I gave it a thumbs up for him having the courage to use a word which I know the meaning of (although that’s obvious because I made the comment) but which I personally think many readers would have to look up. Perhaps I’m wrong about that but we’ll never know.

I don’t understand the comment “apparently that was a milestone for him.” Perhaps he thought it was the first time I’d seen an unusual (?) word used in that way. Which would be a misconception because I have, on many occasions, seen a word in a story and wondered why the writer used it. I would think many people, not just writers, will have done the same. Perhaps I should have made myself clearer and the the misunderstanding wouldn’t have occurred.

But, as you see, overall I liked the story which is why I gave it 5. I hope that’s cleared up my thinking behind Gordo using “discombobulated.”

First, thank you for the kind comments and score you gave the story. There won't be a sequel. The category hasn't got enough response for me to spend the time. I was going to expand it into series of stories where Albin rights social wrongs in an evil way, which was the underpinning of the "Evil" story. Not that it was supposed to be. The original vision was a battle between good and evil. Good was supposed to win. Ha!

I did understand your comment on discombobulated. I'm not sure why I used "milestone" when I wrote about the comment; it just jumped into my head while I was writing.

I agree with you on the language issue. A couple of other authors here brought up the same thing when they commented. I agonized over the choice while I was writing it. I wrote it one way and didn't like it. I changed it and didn't like it. I changed it back and still didn't like it, so I left it. So that you know, I'll use the slang in dialogue and keep the normal words in the story as you and the others have suggested.

Again thanks for the kind words.

 

[TadOverdon]

You are obviously concerned about the environment and wish to reduce your carbon footprint.

Just be careful, iron is brittle.

True enough.

I have not been able to resist overthinking this since posting it. Iron suggests to me something strong and basic and ancient, something from the Earth. Steel is somehow grandiose and boastful.

 

[oggbashan]

I have had a comment that the word 'dandruff' appeared for the first time ever in a Lit story.

But I use a wider vocabulary than most Lit writers.

My story 'Breathless Stargazing' frustrated Grammarly and other grammar checkers to get a reading ease of 0 and a grade level of 99.

 

[Emirus]

But I use a wider vocabulary than most Lit writers.

You big headed young bugger! You’ll be changing your name to egobashan next. lol.

 

[oggbashan]

You big headed young bugger! You’ll be changing your name to egobashan next. lol.

It's NOT a good thing to do.

 

[gordo12]

What Simon and NotWise said: "unique" doesn't mean nobody else is using those words, just that your story had a vocabulary of 3159 different words.

Further to that, Grammarly is used heavily for non-fiction writing and there's no obvious reason to expect that the vocabulary within a business proposal or a college assignment would be the same size as a fiction story of equivalent length, so I'm not sure the "more than 98% of users" stat is terribly meaningful.

I usually write in whatever style fits the characters and feels best for telling the story. If I use an esoteric word here or there, well, it's never been easier for people to look those up as they read. If they don't want to do that, I am probably not the right author for them.

I thought further about this answer, and it hit me. There are business people composing emails or letters. There are college students writing papers. I'll bet not one of them is using cock, cunt, tits, ass, and a whole lot of other sex terms doing so.

Of course, writing sex stories will produce a wealth of unique words to the system. I should have thought of that before! DUH!

 

[Bramblethorn]

I thought further about this answer, and it hit me. There are business people composing emails or letters. There are college students writing papers. I'll bet not one of them is using cock, cunt, tits, ass, and a whole lot of other sex terms doing so.

Of course, writing sex stories will produce a wealth of unique words to the system. I should have thought of that before! DUH!

That's not what it means by unique though.

If I write "the cat sat on the mat", software like Grammarly will count five unique words: the, cat, sat, on, mat. The second "the" doesn't count. But it doesn't matter how many other authors are using "the" or "on" in their own work, my first "the" and "on" will still be counted as unique words within my work.

Put another way, it's telling you how big your vocabulary is, as demonstrated in this piece of writing.

 

[SimonDoom]

I thought further about this answer, and it hit me. There are business people composing emails or letters. There are college students writing papers. I'll bet not one of them is using cock, cunt, tits, ass, and a whole lot of other sex terms doing so.

Of course, writing sex stories will produce a wealth of unique words to the system. I should have thought of that before! DUH!

I don't think that one can assume that any type of fiction, including erotic fiction, is going to feature a higher mean number of unique words per X words of text than nonfiction. It might be so, but, for example, technical or academic or professional writing of any kind will feature words that are peculiar to that specialty.

It would not surprise me if works of fiction, generally, demonstrate higher mean unique word rates, but I'd be speculating about that.

I'm sure the mean rate for erotic fiction is not that much higher than that for the kind of stuff for which Grammarly is most frequently used. If you're at 98% it has more to do with you than with the type of stuff you are writing.

 

[KeithD]

That's not what it means by unique though.

If I write "the cat sat on the mat", software like Grammarly will count five unique words: the, cat, sat, on, mat. The second "the" doesn't count. But it doesn't matter how many other authors are using "the" or "on" in their own work, my first "the" and "on" will still be counted as unique words within my work.

Put another way, it's telling you how big your vocabulary is, as demonstrated in this piece of writing.

Bingo.

 

[gordo12]

This straight from Grammarly: "VOCABULARY
The Vocabulary section will show you how many unique words you’ve written throughout the prior week. The percentage shown lets you know how dynamic — meaning, how varied and diverse — your vocabulary is relative to Grammarly users."

That seems to say to me it's being measured against other users.

Put another way, it's telling you how big your vocabulary is

 

[SimonDoom]

This straight from Grammarly: "VOCABULARY
The Vocabulary section will show you how many unique words you’ve written throughout the prior week. The percentage shown lets you know how dynamic — meaning, how varied and diverse — your vocabulary is relative to Grammarly users."

That seems to say to me it's being measured against other users.

I think there's some miscommunication going on. Maybe some don't understand your original post.

In your original post, you suggested based on Grammarly's stats report that its measure of "unique words" meant that you are using words others don't use. That might be true, but you cannot infer it from the Grammarly unique words stat.

All it means is that you use a greater VARIETY of words in a story than others do in stories of the same length. There might be nothing unique or interesting about the particular words that you choose. You might just do a better job of achieving variety with common words than others do. You might -- you probably do, based on these numbers -- have a knack for being less repetitive than others. It is also possible that you use more strange words and have a large vocabulary, but that possibility doesn't necessarily follow from these stats.

 

[KeithD]

It just catalogs the number of separate words used (unique uses) in the sample. All of the inferences from that are left to you.

 

[Bramblethorn]

This straight from Grammarly: "VOCABULARY
The Vocabulary section will show you how many unique words you’ve written throughout the prior week. The percentage shown lets you know how dynamic — meaning, how varied and diverse — your vocabulary is relative to Grammarly users."

That seems to say to me it's being measured against other users.

The vocabulary size, yes. The individual word choices, no.

If I write "the cat sat on the mat", and you write "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", Grammarly will count five unique words for me and eight for you. Based on those numbers, it can tell you that your vocabulary is more diverse than that of "other users" (me).

But what it's not doing is paying attention to which individual words you're using vs. what I'm using. It's not making any sort of "Gordo used 'fox' and Bramble didn't" comparisons, and likewise it doesn't care that both of us used "the"; your unique word count won't drop when I write my story.

Considering how many people are using Grammarly, just about every word you use in your story will be showing up somewhere in other people's writing that week. It would be astonishing if more than a couple were unique across all users; five thousand is implausible.

My point about Grammarly being used for different kinds of writing was not "nobody else out there will be using 'cock' or 'pussy'" but "different types of writing have different vocabulary sizes and comparing the vocabulary size of a fiction story to the vocabulary size of a business report isn't going to be meaningful". Even if that business is a farm that keeps cocks to produce baby chicks and pussies to chase away the mice.

 

[Comshaw]

My

https://www.naela.org/app_themes/public/images/TwoCents2.gif

worth:

The last report I got from Grammarly told me "42,024 words checked". That number came from a series I was posting and the fact I checked through it numerous times (and still missed some mistakes FFS). Because of different limitations, I know for a fact I could never have typed that many words without sitting behind this keyboard 16 hours a day 7 days a week over that period of time.

Without a basic understanding of what they mean by "unique" words, I don't put much stock in those stats from Grammarly.

I have used other methods to check my vocabulary. Two of them:

https://www.vocabularytester.com/vocabulary-test-english

https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/VIQT/

I scored pretty well for an old semi-educated sausage-fingered writer. That second site is interesting because rather than having you choose the words you know, they have you pick two words that are synonymous. And the final score is akin to an IQ test score.

Comshaw

 

[gordo12]

I got another email today with the 98% figure again. I reached out to Grammarly and asked them what they were really trying to tell us.

Here is their response. I seem to remember someone posting something similar so don't forget to collect your prize!

"Hi Gordo,

Thanks for contacting Grammarly Customer Support! I'm happy to answer this for you.

Vocabulary is calculated based on the number of unique words that were checked. For example, if you used the word ‘Beautiful’ five times in a week, then it will count as one unique word. However, all five uses of the word will be counted in the Productivity section. This is why the Productivity number will almost always be higher than the Vocabulary number. (It is possible for you to have a tie if you don’t use any word more than once.)

Please note that in this context, we use the word "unique" in the sense of "different." This metric is intended to help users see how many different words they used as opposed to the total number of words they wrote.

Function words such as 'and' and 'the' are included in the Vocabulary calculation.

You can find more information in this article: https://gram****/Ds9z

 

[MillieDynamite]

What does Grammarly mean by "unique word?"

I'd assume that among your 57,635 words (impressive output by my standards), there were 3,159 different words, many of which were repeated. If that's higher than 98% of Grammarly users, than your English is diverse.

It could mean (as you suggest) that the words aren't used by other writers, but that wasn't my first reaction.

I don't really see how that violates KISS. I guess it depends on what the words are. If you write dialog with slang or in dialect, then that will add a lot of unique words. If you try to avoid repetition by mixing in different words for the same thing, then that will add new words. Unless you go an extra distance into dialect and slang, then I don't think either of those violates KISS.

Does Grammarly give you a reading level?

A unique word is a word used only once in the document. Your total unique words, which Grammarly reports to you, are the words used only once in all the individual documents, but may have been used more than once between the documents. So rap is used one time in three documents it is counted as 3 unique words between the total.

No Grammarly doesn't not give you Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level or easy of reading stats.

 

[KeithD]

A unique word is a word used only once in the document.

No, that's not true, and it's not what I read as the explanation given by Grammarly. It's a word unique from any other word used in the work--it could be used thirty-six times in the work and be a unique word by the explanation Grammarly gives and that was my surmise.

 

[MillieDynamite]

No, that's not true, and it's not what I read as the explanation given by Grammarly. It's a word unique from any other word used in the work--it could be used thirty-six times in the work and be a unique word by the explanation Grammarly gives and that was my surmise.

Not trying to argue with you but here is what CEO of AutoCrit says about unique words.

"When Grammarly or ProWritingAid tells you the number of unique words that you’ve used, then they are taking all the words that you’ve written and counting the number of distinct words that you’ve used. If you’ve used the same word multiple times then it is only counted once. For example, “I love bacon and sausage and ham.” This sentence is 7 words, but only 6 unique words because the word “and” appears twice.

Grammarly will take all the text that you’ve written and count the unique words across it. This figure has limited use. It doesn’t really tell you the size of your vocabulary."

It is said that Poe used 80,000 different words only one time in all of his writings. Words like ague, apothegm, autos-da-fé, castellated, eld, flacon, ignus fatui, moiety, paean, pertinacity, Pyrrhonism, roquelaire, Sexagesima, Stygian, supposititious and surcingle. or from the Raven, "Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore"

I went to a unique word counter, ran one of my stories, of the 4,651 total words in the story, 1,404 words appeared in the text only one time, which is 30.19% of the total words used. This is how unique words were explained to me, as non repeated words.

 

[KeithD]

"If you’ve used the same word multiple times then it is only counted once."

This sentence seems absolutely clear to me.

 

[MillieDynamite]

u·nique(y-nk)
adj.
1. Being the only one of its kind:

Definition of unique seems pretty simple to me as well. As the site I use to check unique words in my stories makes it clear, it the word appears more than once in the document, it is no longer unique. maybe you have a different definition of unique than the what the dictionary uses.

 

[MetaBob]

I got another email today with the 98% figure again. I reached out to Grammarly and asked them what they were really trying to tell us.

Here is their response. I seem to remember someone posting something similar so don't forget to collect your prize!

"Hi Gordo,

Thanks for contacting Grammarly Customer Support! I'm happy to answer this for you.

Vocabulary is calculated based on the number of unique words that were checked. For example, if you used the word ‘Beautiful’ five times in a week, then it will count as one unique word. However, all five uses of the word will be counted in the Productivity section. This is why the Productivity number will almost always be higher than the Vocabulary number. (It is possible for you to have a tie if you don’t use any word more than once.)

Please note that in this context, we use the word "unique" in the sense of "different." This metric is intended to help users see how many different words they used as opposed to the total number of words they wrote.

Function words such as 'and' and 'the' are included in the Vocabulary calculation.

You can find more information in this article: https://gram****/Ds9z

Jeesh, are people still jabbering on about this? This seems definitive, and isn't the first time in this thread that a definitive answer has been issued.

I got my (irregularly) weekly update from Grammarly a few minutes ago:

You were more productive than 98% of Grammarly users.
You were more accurate than 97% of Grammarly users.
You used more unique words than 99% of Grammarly users.

Here's the thing, Grammarly: 90+% of what you give me is crap, so I don't care about your meaningless stats, though I'm thankful for what you give me, which is usually about 1 mistake per 5-10K words that no one else (meaning, mostly, me) has caught.

 

[KeithD]

u·nique(y-nk)
adj.
1. Being the only one of its kind:

Definition of unique seems pretty simple to me as well. As the site I use to check unique words in my stories makes it clear, it the word appears more than once in the document, it is no longer unique. maybe you have a different definition of unique than the what the dictionary uses.

My goodness you're thick. We're talking Grammarly and its definition for the term. It gave us its definition. Anyone else's is irrelevant for this issue.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I don't pay attention to what Grammarly says my unique word count is. I use another site to see how many times I use the same words in story and try increase the amount of unique (one time use) words I have and reduce the use of the same word over and over in a story. Like preventing using the word beautiful 20 times or swift 15 times.

I assumed, and apparently incorrectly, that Grammarly understood a word is only unique if it is only used once. I don't know how to have Grammarly tell me how many times I used the word club. I do know how to find repetitions easily in autocrit. But in the end, I look to see how many words are unique in that story, appearing only one time.

I think is some cases what we are talking about are uncommon words, the words outside the most commonly used words. Then you have complicated words those words having more than 2 or 3 syllables in them and no I can't remember which it is. There is a whole lot keep an eye on to keep stories interesting beyond the "show don't tell" rule.

In the end, unique words, uncommon words, and complicated words are just words and how you put them all together is what makes a story work or not.

In my stupid little creative writing course I took at OCCC ( Oklahoma City Community College or Ok triple C) way back in 2011 they said unique words were words that only appeared once in your story.

Oh, and please don't refer to me as thick, you haven't seen me. If you want say I'm slow on the uptake, I don't get it, or I'm dense, that's fine, but thick, no, no KD don't say such stuff. Such words aren't about a persons mind where I'm from, and I'm not a thick gal.

 

[KeithD]

Sorry, Millie, I think it was those 12 ghostwritten novels you claim--and the 50 ghostwritten short stories even more. Novel ghosting isn't much of a thing anymore, especially by someone with the skills set you show, and I doubt you have any idea how much time/effort has to go into ghosting anything. And ghostwriting short stories in volume isn't real. This all has a "trying much too hard" sense to it. I'm thinking a sophomore in high school here. That's the vibe I'm getting. Best of luck to you.

 

[Bramblethorn]

u·nique(y-nk)
adj.
1. Being the only one of its kind:

Definition of unique seems pretty simple to me as well. As the site I use to check unique words in my stories makes it clear, it the word appears more than once in the document, it is no longer unique. maybe you have a different definition of unique than the what the dictionary uses.

There's more than one dictionary in the world, and most dictionaries I'm familiar with offer (ironically enough) more than one definition of "unique".

Rather than searching through dozens of different dictionaries, looking at the different ways in which they define "unique", and trying to figure out which (if any) is applicable here, the sensible thing to do would be to look at the Grammarly site for information about how they define it:

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/new-grammarly-insights/

Vocabulary is calculated based on the number of unique words that were checked. For example, if you used the word ‘Beautiful’ five times in a week, then it will count as one unique word. However, all five uses of the word will be counted in the Productivity section. This is why Productivity number will almost always be higher than Vocabulary number. (It is possible for you to have a tie if you don’t use any word more than once.)

No "if you use the word exactly once". No "if nobody else has used the word".

If you're still not convinced, try it out. Submit a document that contains only "electricity electricity president" and see what Grammarly tells you for your unique word count on that doc.

If you believe Grammarly's "unique" means "words you used exactly once", you should expect a count of 1 unique word.

If you believe it means "words nobody else used", you should expect a count of zero, because I absolutely guarantee somebody else out there is writing about electricity and/or presidents at any given time.

But if it means "the number of different words you have used", like I and several other people in this thread have been saying over and over, it will count "electricity" once and "president" once and give you a total of 2.

Seriously, try it out. Experiment is easy and much more reliable than guessing whether Grammarly's "unique" means the same thing as whichever dictionary we happen to be looking at.