Vocabprofile
A brief explanation may be in order, should you try to use the bot. K1 words are the words that are the bare necessities for the reader to even slightly understand what the text is about. K2 is the next step that enables the second language user to be able to communicate with a remote success.
These are technically very basic words that are most frequently used and accessed by language speakers and learners and are the crucial part to understanding the text. The higher the total percentage of the first two items combined, the more accessable the text is supposed to be.
Other items on the lists, on the right side of the result breakdown are the word counts. Since a word can be categorised by different systems, the bot tries to address this in its algorythms and counts words as 1) Tokens (Each word is individually counted, no matter how many times it repeats), 2) Types (One word - one type, if it repeats through the text it won't be counted) and 3) Word Families (Inflected, derived and shortened forms of a word each count as a word family, for example, familiar - unfamiliar - familiarise - familiarity are all the same word family unit)
It's quite a neat bot and anyone concerned about the accessibility of their text ought to check it out some time. And waste their time pasting random texts into it as well, to spite people like Stephen King. Ghghgh.
Gematriculator
The Gematriculator is an oldie, but it's still an entertaining little bot that supposedly calculates your writings' evilness value. If you intend to become a pile of seething malevolence but lack a little guidance, you ought to start here (or pay me to write a guidebook about it). I do have to warn that it's not quite necessarily a reliable means of assessing a text, but it does calculate the "evil"-sounding compounds and words in an alright-ish manner.
Gender Guesser
A rather useless, but still fairly amusing bot named Gender Guesser. If you can't guess the gender of a text's author, you can try pasting it in for... well, some sort of a result. I'm going to test this on some test subjects and then, perhaps, report the finds (aka I probably won't bother), but, if any of you get called a female when you aren't, or vice versa, do tell of your finds!
The Gender Genie
Something I found through Gender Guesser just now, a bot that looks a lot more comprehensive and transparent and actually useable in academic research, writing and creating a fake gender identity. In fact, I'd recommend skipping Gender Guesser altogether and going for the Gender Genie if you want to mess around, as on top of being more comprehensive, it offers the option to choose from fiction, non-fiction and blog styles. Blog. Damn I hate that word.
Well, work-wise I'm resoundingly a bloke. Which possibly isn't surprising considering what I write about and the audience for whom I write.
ReplyDeleteHowever on a more cheerful note, my (only) bit of fiction makes me female.
And I'm consistently scoring - work or non-work words - at about 80% at the general readability thing. Which considering a classical education and a specialist readership is, I think, all right.
And I'm mostly good too. :)
Ah, apparently my 80% score is rubbish as it means readers only easily understand four words in five.
ReplyDeleteI'm not convinced/not heartbroken though. I do use specialist words in my writing, and I do use challenging words. I hope they're not unclear in context though. I'd rather challenge than bore with the same monotonous language.
That's not to say I don't admire people who can score a good 95% or higher. Go read one of the British tabloids like the Sun - whatever you may think of the content, the journalism is bloody impressive. The writers manage to boil the most complex stories down into language accessible by people with a very low reading age. That takes phenomenal skill and writing ability.
So I'll continue to ponder my impenetrability. But enjoy a language that allows me to ponder, wonder, think, muse, contemplate, consider, and a host of other words that mean much the same but with slightly different connotations...