Computer Writing and Research Lab | University of Texas at Austin

a cool word frequency tool

Submitted by Jim Brown on October 23, 2006 - 6:59am

A great tool recently made the rounds on the techrhet listserv. If you paste text into it, it gives you the word frequency of the essay. You can view the results as a tag cloud (like the tag cloud that we have on our page) so that words used most frequently are the largest in the cloud. You can also view a "graph" that provides a list with the number of times each word occurs.

Karen Schwalm, the person who posted this to the listserv, used this tool to talk about coherence in an essay, and she points out the following:

Then in some investigation of tag clouds (those visual representations of word frequency), I read a comment that indicated that the more frequently a word is used, the less meaning it had. Bing! That makes sense.

(Incidentally, this reminded me of the "general pedagogy" tag on our site - which ends up being a big old dump for entries that nobody knows what to do with. It's kind of become our "miscellaneous category.)

She also notes some concern that the tool will have students breaking out the thesaurus - a valid concern, but definitely something you could discourage if need be. Either way, it seems like a really useful tool:

http://www.estrellamountain.edu/library/tags.html

»

In Defense of the Thesaurus

Submitted by jeremydean on November 2, 2006 - 1:24pm.

Though I understand the concern, I think this is a great tool for simply avoiding repetition. Varying word choice is one of the most concrete things I think that you can tell a student in terms of improving the "flow" of an essay. I would use it for a basic ratiocination exercise in a revision workshop.

»

Interesting possibilities

Submitted by SarahJett on November 3, 2006 - 11:43am.

This tool seems like it would be quite useful for creative writing, or for any exercise that focused on composition itself. You could, for example, have students write a paragraph, then write it again without using any of the words (excluding articles, pronouns, and basic verbs) they had used the first time. Or, you could have them use the same words to write a completely different paragraph. That sounds like fun.

»

I tried this out on a

Submitted by wdmartin on October 25, 2006 - 1:54pm.

I tried this out on a student essay, and was pleased with the results. I THOUGHT that one had way too many occurrences of the word "effectively" (14).

Then, suddenly, I realized two things:

1) I had pasted the student's name in as well, which is a no-no.

2) We don't know whether they keep information posted in the form.

The first of those is clearly my fault. But the second is beyond our control. We could potentially run into trouble with federal privacy laws if we go around transmitting copies of student papers to unknown third parties.

Have we got source code for either of these two tools available? The only really good way to determine whether the script retains the data someplace is to examine its source code. Also, if we had the source code we could set up a local version on a CWRL server, which would solve the problem.

»

Jim, this is very cool. I

Submitted by Ljones on October 25, 2006 - 11:46am.

Jim, this is very cool. I tried it in my newest poem draft and was dismayed to find the highest use of a non-connector word was "feel." Yeck! I would definitely like to use it as a literature-analysis tool in class next semester--it seems like a good starting point for a conversation about structure & form.

»

tagcrowd.com

Submitted by Jim Brown on October 24, 2006 - 6:52am.

Yet another tag cloud/word count tool:

http://tagcrowd.com/

I'm thinking of using this in class - If I do, I'll report back.

»