University of Richmond Writer's Web

We've just come across another very useful site for academic writers - very clearly organised and helpful. It's from the University of Richmond in the USA, and well worth exploring. Check it out here.

Concordancer

Our final post on Lextutor is about Concordancer. With the concordancer, you enter words to find out how they are used in the corpuses the site makes use of.

Let's say, I want to know how to use the word 'research'; I enter the word into the keyword box, and select the corpus I want to use (it's a drop down box) and submit. You get something like the following back, and studying it you start to see how 'research' is used and the types of words that are commonly used with 'research'.

Vocabulary Profiler in Action

If you put a text into the profiler, you'll see something like this (click to enlarge): Blue words are the most frequent 1000 words in English, green words are from the 1001-2000 range (GSL2) and yellow words are from the Academic Word List. The red words are the 'others'; very often these might be technical words from your own field.

A nice feature of the profiler is that you can edit your text in another window, changing words to make your vocabulary more varied and sophisticated.

Vocabulary Profiler

LexTutor also has a Vocabulary Profiler. You can enter any text into the vocabulary profiler and it will tell you, for example, which words in the text are from General Service Lists 1 and 2, and which are from the Academic Word List and give you percentages.

Some people say that very good academic writing makes use of more lower frequency words. You can get an idea of your profile by entering a text into the profiler, and comparing your writing, say, with an article from your field.

Academic Phrase Bank

There's a useful bank of words and phrases you can use in academic writing at the Manchester University Phrasebank. 

Paper Rater

Paper Rater is another site you might try out. You paste your text into a window and ask for a report, which examines your writing according to six categories, as shown below (click image to enlarge):

Readability statistics in Word

When word has finished a spelling and grammar check and if you have checked the Flesch and Flesch-Kincaid options in word, you should see something like the image on the left. This gives an idea of the level you are writing at. The Flesch-Kincaid level approximates to the American High School system. Here the grade level is 12.0 - meaning 12th grade, age around 17-18 would be the lowest level at which to use this piece of writing.
Now take a look at this explanation of the Reading Ease formula. As you'll see 17.7 means you need to be a college graduate to deal with the text. There is also a suggestion that the text may be confusing to some readers. Perhaps worth having another look, particularly to check on sentence length and punctuation?