In that case, you can use Microsoft Word or any other word processor for calculating the word count and even the character count of your text document.
But what if you want a more detailed analysis of that text document - like the frequency of individual words, number of unique words, average number of words per sentence or how easy or difficult a text is to read (using Lexical Density and Fog Index)
There's a simple online solution from UsingEnglish.com called Text Content Analyzer - copy-paste the text block in the form and this useful tool will generate an interesting analysis of your text.
As an illustration, here's the word frequency cloud of the recent story on CNet vs Gawker.
Infact, Todd Bishop used this tool itself for generating the word frequency cloud of Steve Jobs keynote and Bill Gates' speech at Macworld and CES respectively.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/02/analyze-your-text-writing-for-word.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Actually, even in MS word there is very interesting statistic called readability stats. You have to check that option in Spelling and Grammer tag but then it gives readability in 2 scales. One is 0 to 100 where lower means tough to read. Other is average grade (class) that person need to have cleared to be able to understand that. If you look up names of those stats on Wikipedia, it gives the formula too. I find them interesting at least. -Ashish
Written on 3/2/07 3:47 AM
Hello !
Let me also introduce more professional tool , that calculates not only frequencies of individual words, but also frequencies of phrases and wordforms . You can sort , filter and export results and highlight them in original text. Summary statistics and charts are available as well.
If interested, take a look at :
http://www.cro-code.com/textanz.jsp
Kind regards,
Cro-Code
Written on 3/2/07 1:59 PM