Program/App/Macro whatever for finding repeated words?

Most of the common writing packages (Scrivener, yWriter, etc.) will do that.

I found a script that will work in MS Word, called Word Usage and Frequency, found here: http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/word_tip_pages/word_usage_and_frequency_report.html. It's suited my purposes.

EDIT: Well, these won't do exactly what you want, but they will give you a count of how many times you used a particular word. Then you'd have to do a search-and-destroy mission find-and-replace for individual instances.

Take a look through MS Word's Grammar Checker. I think it has *something* for that. I'll see if I can find something.

RoughDraft's search function can do this: "Find All" produces a list of lines with the target word, so you can see each use in context. Click a line to go to it in the document. (It can also do this for multiple documents at once.)

[This, in fact, was THE feature that stole me away from WordPerfect.]

You'd have to specify the target regardless; otherwise you'd be informed that you overuse and and the.

It's just a search function, but the advantage is that you can see each use in context and go to each one with a single click, and it will provide a count (up to 1000 uses).

This is not a perfect answer, but it might help, somewhat:
http://education.ky.gov/districts/t...microsoft-word-checks-for-overused-words.aspx
If you activate MS Word's Search&Replace function (CTRL+H), you can type a word into the "Find What" box, then type the caret and ampersand (^&) into the "Replace with" box. Click the MORE button and select "All" for what to search, and then select "Find Whole Words Only". When you click "Replace All", you'll get a dialogue box that says it replaced X instances. The caret-ampersand doesn't cause any actual replacement. You wind up with a count of how many times that word occurred in the text you searched.

NOTE: I haven't played around this very much, but in Word 2013, there's a check box for "Find all word forms." It appears to catch past and present tense, ING forms, and plurals as well as singulars. Or it seemed to in the couple of words I tried.

So that's not a general search. But if you have particular concerns, that might provide some help.

See these two stickied posts here about Microsoft Word Macros:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11653

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26020

This program will find words or phrases that are repeated within a few paragraphs of each other. I've never used it so can't say how well it works, but it might be worth checking out.

ETA: I find repeats (and other problems, like clunky phrasing) when I read my draft out loud.

If you know the word, MS Word's search and find will find each. You can find which words are overused in one of these other programs, and then use search in MS Word to handle each.

Just reading the manuscript always worked for me. I can tell when I'm overusing a word.

The trouble with these programs is that they have no judgment. You can use some words a hundred times, and it's fine. Other word are overused with only two or three uses. Some words, in fact, shouldn't be used at all because they're the wrong word for the job.

Count isn't what matters. Usage is what matters. If it's the right word for the job, it doesn't matter how many times you use it. If it's the wrong word, even once is too many times.