tools for writing analysis online

As a conversational (sometimes controversial) English teacher in Korea, I don’t see a lot of writing.  What I do see is short and simplistic.  My students see more writing from me than I do from them, I think.  Huh, I should look into the volume of written input vs output…

At the Six Things Blog, Lindsay Clandfield lists six writing analysis tool available online.  Four of them are mostly for entertainment value, “Which famous writer you write like”, but one is a ‘vocabulary profiler‘ and another is a ‘text content analyzer‘.

The latter looks at “…something called the Gunning Fog index, which tells you what level of education (American education) your reader needs to have to understand. My writing requires a grade eight education to read which is either a testament to my clear and incisive prose or shows that I’ve been writing simplified grammar exercises and texts too long perhaps.”  I hear ya, Lindsay.  I fear my vocabulary has been shrinking during my time in south Korea.

The former, the vocabulary profiler, “Vocabulary Profilers break texts down by word frequencies in the language at large.” I used this tool quite a bit when writing low level texts or adapting texts for lower levels” .

These two websites could be useful to check that the text you give your students is at the correct level of difficulty.

The others look fun, and expect a further post telling you who I write like.