It Was A Dark And Stormy Night ....

If you have kids taking the SATs or writing college essays, you know that the writing portion of the SATs is graded automatically using a computer algorithm that can grade >16,000 essays in 20 seconds! Even the GREs use a combination of an AI robot and a human reader for assessment. This system can be gamed and as far as I am concerned, it is flat out stupid, but then such tools are not only here to stay, but who knows, they may continue to improve. So, while we wait for our AI Shakespeare, let's consider a couple of tools I sometimes use and what such tools may be useful for.

 

A spelling and grammar check is an essential component of editing. We are all used to the built-in tools in MS-Word. They are adequate, as long as you are careful to not take their diagnosis and prescriptions too seriously. The spell check will not save you from the sorts of error I find often on IL. It will not help you distinguish misuse of words - loose vs lose, quiet vs quite, principal vs principle.

The grammar-check is somewhat imperious, not conducive to poetic fancy. Adequate for corporate-speak I should guess. If you want something better, Grammarly may work for you. There are both free and premium versions available. The full program is a subscription service at ~$145/year. Again you might want to look around for institutional access. Grammarly is significantly better than the MS-Word tools. There are other similar services, but I have not used them.

 

One way I try to overcome my instant word reuse tic mentioned above is to use a word frequency counter. This is a piece of software that generates an ordered list of words in a passage and the frequency with which they are used. If I find that I have used the same word multiple times, then I go back and edit. I find this very useful to do. However, this is not all such tools can do.

Automated tools, if used with care, can provide a range of statistics on your writing that can form the basis of self-monitoring exercises, a loose measure of progress. You can play with the tools mentioned below and see what works for you, but let me draw your attention to two scores:

(1) Lexical Density: This is defined as the number of ‘lexical words’ (content words) divided by the total number of words. It is a measure of how informative a text is.

(2) Readability: There are many measures of readability. Two common indices are the Flesch-Kincaid readability level and the Gunning’s Fog Index. These try to estimate how ‘readable’ a text is and what grade level of education is required to read a particular passage. There are many, many indices with a variety of formulas. Some of the tools below will tell you what they are.

These are fallible indices, to be used with caution. Play around and see whether they help you. Some reasons to be aware of them even if you don’t use them are the following:

(a) Automated scoring systems, such as the ones mentioned above from ETS, use them. So if you wish to practice, these programs may be useful. Not to mention the sheer joy of inflicting them on your kids!

(b) In many situations, one is required to target a specific grade-level of readability. For example, in the United States, hospitals are required to ensure that all their patient handouts can be read by anyone with an eighth-grade education. That pamphlet warning you about Guillain-Barré when you get your flu shot? Eighth-grade level. In the case of consent forms for patients participating in clinical trials, a sixth to eighth-grade level is the requirement. If you are interested in some form of search engine optimization to increase traffic to your website, then you are better off aiming for a similar level of readability depending on your target audience.

I hope you get the drift. Now instead of carrying on, let me point you to some tools and you can have at it. We can revisit this topic if necessary after you have had a chance to take a test drive. The tools I use most often (with GREAT CAUTION!!!!!!) are:

Word Counter (Downloadable app. I use this one a lot, in combination with a thesaurus, especially to avoid clunky repetition).
Lexical Density
Textalyser

 

None of the tools mentioned in the posts above will bring poetry to a barren soul. That takes careful cultivation. What they can do is help you avoid mistakes and repetitive, monotonous prose.

I try to cut people a lot of slack with their writing, especially non-native speakers. With an educated person from urban India, I am more ambivalent. If such a person were to send me a clunkily worded job application, I begin to wonder - here is a fellow who did not have the foresight or care to have his letter/CV edited/proofread by someone more knowledgable than he. How careful can I expect him to be with his research? How much initiative dare I expect?

Take advantage of the tools available to you. Even the blunt automated tools can help enhance your sensitivity to language when used with care, at least for simple expository writing, if not for your Great Indian Novel.



Note: MS-Office has some redability stats built-in. See here.

 

I am certainly not discouraging it. I write by ear. I was trying to say that we write as native speakers do, naturally, without laborious grammar consultations. If you were to learn a new language as an adult, then you might find yourself translating from English (in your head) and then carefully consulting conjugation and declension tables to get things right. This is not what happens with educated Indians writing in English (unless educated in a vernacular language). We write first and then if we know what's good for us, we edit, looking for lapses in subject-verb agreement, tense etc.

 

Yes, there are rules to cover this in research. The boundaries are fuzzier in literary borrowings. You can't really write "If music be the food of love, play on" and call it your own, but which valley girl would you credit for "I can't even ...!" ?