The Wasteline Test
I confess. I love measuring things. I don’t know if it’s a competitive streak, or it’s related to my word-meter + office supply obsession I mentioned yesterday, but ooooh how I do.
I found this little “test” for writers yesterday called The Wasteline Test. It measures the overall flab of your writing by checking out your use of passive voice, abstract nouns, prepositions, adjectives & adverbs, and this-that-there. Not fully comprehensive, by any means, but still. All you do is paste 100-1200 words of your writing into the box, and then it rates your writing from “lean” to “heart-attack” in the five categories, and highlights your useage in colour-coded form. (oooh.. colour-coded!)
I was pleased to get “lean” rating all across for the first 800 words of Wildings, and I also tried yesterday’s blog post. I thought I’d do much worse on the blog, since I do almost no self-editing here, but my blog post came out “lean” on all categories except for passive, for which I got “fit and trim”.
Whether or not any of this means anything, I have no idea! But it’s a bit of fun anyway, and you never know… it might just help!
I wish I could remember where I found this … so a big thank you to whichever of my bloggy friends posted this first. Sorry.. I’m not THAT organised!
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I’m lean too – guess the dieting is working.
Wow, very interesting. I’ll have to try it! Good job on your “lean” writing.
Wow, way cool. I’m off the check my own writing now.
Yay!!! I’m fit and trim!!!
I credit my new fitflops!!!
What a great link, thank you! I am now obsessively cutting and pasting other stuff I wrote – LOL!
Take care
x
I will give this a try. I’m at the editing phase now and am finding some passive voice, so this would be a fun experiment, as well as, I fear, very revealing.
Helen
Straight From Hel
[ Follow me on Twitter: MermaidHel ]
What a great tool to use, to sort of monitor how we’re coming along with our writing. Every little bit of advice helps!
OMG! That was soooo cool! I hit ‘flabby’ for be verbs the first time (everything else was lean) I made two quick changes and I am fit & healthy again.
THANKS
That’s cool – I’ll have to try it!
Awesome – I received a lean rating as well!
[ Follow me on Twitter: alexjcavanaugh ]
Yay – I’m lean… well, my writing is…
[ Follow me on Twitter: jemifraser ]
Outcha-Magoucha — the Waistline Test is a cool site. I’m adding a link to my desktop right now. Better still: our summer semester begins Monday (52 fresh & eager students await–yeah, right!) and I’m putting a link on THAT page, as well.
They’ll have someone else to be mad at! Yay.
[ Follow me on Twitter: girlfrenkate ]
Fit and trim! Most of the time! Never lean, except in the individual categories. Oh well
nice!
I’m going to give this a try, also, and tweet about the results.
This is soo cool! I got Fit and Trim
I feel so sassy now I’m going to go dive back into my writing LOL. Thanks for the cool tool 
[ Follow me on Twitter: elisevancise ]
So cool! I have to try this!
Woot! Fit n trim, lean, lean, lean and fit n trim. I dun gude!
Thanks for the link. I’m going to forward your blog to the members of my writing group.
[ Follow me on Twitter: dasos1 ]
That’s great. I so glad you shared that link. I plugged in my last two pieces of flash fiction and they both did pretty well. Mostly lean. A couple of spots of fit-and-trim. Some spot exercises might tighten those areas up. Sit ups, I think.
~jon
[ Follow me on Twitter: jmstro ]
Ooh! I got ‘lean’ all across for my favourite of the stories I have on the market at the moment. (And that even with it thinking that ‘station’ and ‘compartments’ are abstract nouns in a paragraph about central European railways…)
This is cool. Thank you!
[ Follow me on Twitter: MariaZannini ]
Great idea! I think I enjoy listing things as much as you enjoy measuring them.
Hi,
Came across your blog through Brigid’s. What a great tool, will definitely use it!
[ Follow me on Twitter: oliveobrien ]
What an awesome idea. Will have to give it a go.
[ Follow me on Twitter: jessica.carmen.bellgmail.com ]
India, I tried out the test and loved it. It rated my piece “lean” (I think that’s what the term was). Even so, I looked at the breakdown and changed a few things anyway.
Straight From Hel
[ Follow me on Twitter: MermaidHel ]
never heard of this! will try it for sure, thanks!
I’m trying this later today. People have liked your post because a few others have linked it.
COOL- off to try this, thx!
Hahaha this is brilliant, I’m doing it right now!
Tried three different sections of ECHOES and it turns out I’m either ‘lean’ or ‘fit and trim’! Yaaay!
Great link, thanks for that, it was fun!
[ Follow me on Twitter: SanguMandanna ]
How awesome is that! I might put a post about this on the Lit Lab. I think our readers would be thrilled to find it! Thanks!
I came in lean, amazingly enough.
Pretty cool testing device. My samples didn’t check out too badly. I’m going to bookmark the test and mess with it a little more to see how consistently effective it really seems to be.
Lee
Tossing It Out
My writing writing was lean, my current blog post was fit and trim. That was fun.
A shout out to you on my blog today!