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IDEA: super word counter
Joe Hone:
I write for a living and when you get 10,000 words into a subject it is pretty easy for things to start repeating (phrases and sentence starts), and when you are trying to write convincingly, loaded words and phrases tend to repeat (“clearly” “without question”). These things lower the quality of the writing and turn off readers – even subconsciously, we don’t like bad writing.
How about a super word counter, that in addition to counting the standard pages/words/paragraphs/characters/lines, will also generate lists for repeated words, repeated phrases, adverbs (words that tend to end with “ly” – a big no-no for writers) and sentences that start with the same words? It would need some simple filtering so “and” “the” and similar words can be omitted from the search field. There are probably other lists it could compile, but these are the tools I can use most.
To be compatible with different document formats, it would probably work best if it were a standalone program that imported the document for the searches, but it would only generate lists – the user would then look for the words and phrases and make corrections in the original document. This could also be a useful plug-in for a word processor or office suite, but I've never actually tried to use a plug-in with Word, WordPerfect or LibreOffice, the programs I use most, and I don't even know if they would utilize a plug-in.
After writing the above, but before posting, I did a web search and found a more comprehensive filtering program than what I've described - SmartEdit by Bad Wolf Software. Pretty pricey at $49. I didn't find anything else out there with these basic search parameters. There are programs like Word Counter for Mac by Supermagnus Software, but it is more a word counter than a phrase and sentence start tool. And I'm not on a Mac.
Any thoughts?
Ath:
What software do you use for your day to day writing?
Renegade:
You *could* look at some CAT tools to see if they work. There are some free ones out there, though I forget the names. All of the people I work with use Trados.
But, translation memory could help out there. They have tools for dealing with batch jobs, etc.
Check here for some:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_translation#Some_notable_CAT_tools
rjbull:
Not sure it's quite what you want, but you might find TextSTAT - Simple Text Analysis Tool useful:
Concordance software for Windows, GNU/Linux and MacOS
TextSTAT is a simple programme for the analysis of texts. It reads plain text files (in different encodings) and HTML files (directly from the internet) and it produces word frequency lists and concordances from these files. This version includes a web-spider which reads as many pages as you want from a particular website and puts them in a TextSTAT-corpus. The new news-reader, too, puts news messages in a TextSTAT-readable corpus file.
TextSTAT reads MS Word and OpenOffice files. No conversion needed, just add the files to your corpus...
In TextSTAT you can use regular expression which provides you with powerful search possibilities. The programme is multilingual. Because it uses Unicode internally, TextSTAT can cope with many different languages and file encodings.
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Joe Hone:
Most of the time I'm in Word because it is standard in the industry I write for, but occasionally WP and LibreOffice, usually if I'm sent a document written in those programs. If possible, I move the new doc to Word because it simplifies things down the road. OT: I'm waiting for the day when Word loses its dominance for word processing. . .
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