LitAnalyst: A website for analysing creative/technical writing - General

Hello Facepunch, Recently I've been working on a new project to help people quickly analyse their writing based on vocabulary and complexity. The project is called LitAnalyst, a website where you can upload your work and view a quick summary including word count, vocabulary analysis and sentence/word complexity. You are also able to create an account to view and compare all of your uploads. I created this site to try and see whether there is a correlation between writing skill and vocabulary/sentence complexity, and hope it would appeal to high school / college / university students. This project is still very much in early development, and I would like to receive feedback/criticism from writers who are much more experienced than me. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/gUISzYg.png[/IMG] Example Result: [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/zD5OGGf.png[/IMG] You can access a live version the website here: [url]http://nt34.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/litanalyst/index.php[/url] If you are a developer interested in seeing how I made this tool, you can check out the source code on my Github page: [url]https://github.com/NickTikhonov/litanalyst[/url]

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/gyORjqm.png[/IMG] I pasted in an old passage I wrote ages ago. Not bad. [QUOTE]You can never really appreciate something until you're deprived of it. It doesn't matter what it is; objects, people, fresh air... Nobody appreciates the taste of a good meal more than the man who crawled through the desert for three days just to get it, and there’s no place like home when you’re a thousand miles away. There’s no better way to know if you love something than throwing it away just to see if you’ll miss it. Caleb knew this, though he would not be able to articulate the thought as anything more than a fleeting, distant feeling. The world span around him, a blur of green and blue which seemed to ripple at the corners, thick as water but heavy like lead. He was aware of the sun on his back, he would keep forgetting things, but he couldn’t forget that one white hot ember, burning a hole in the vast canvas above him. It was a cigarette, a flashlight, a stoplight on his drive home from work. He tried to hold on to that thought, but it slipped away for awhile before coming back from its hiding place to taunt him. He walked because it was a mechanical action, pure instinct. He did not have the focus or the energy for any real plan of action. The inside of his head was full of fog. His past and future were unreadable, for now, he only had enough focus for the present. It was a garden he thought, or a fever dream. The sky was hot. There was an old stone wall; it kept him walking in a straight line. A part of him that felt very far away hoped this was true. There were trees too, it was summer, his second one in just three months. You can learn to miss anything as long as you’re somewhere worse. Normally Caleb could appreciate the peace and quiet of the countryside. But this wasn’t the same, a garden sounds like life. There was no sound here except for his footsteps and a buzzing in his ears, an inexplicable sound which turned his stomach. Even his footsteps sounded wrong somehow, fake, like a recording. The air was perfectly still, it made the heat worse. It was a dead place. The thought disappeared along with the others, but the hard feeling in his stomach stayed with him for the journey. It was a garden, someone had built this wall. There was someone else here, somewhere. He shuddered, but immediately couldn’t remember why. He tried to remember. Before the garden, there had been a gate, but it was impossible to tell how long ago that was. It felt like weeks, but the sun hadn’t moved an inch. The yellow eye had been staring at him for as far back as he could remember. He couldn’t reach back any further than that, the blank spots in his head drifted endlessly in front of his mind’s eye. He breathed deeply and tensed himself, as if he could force the fog to dissipate with his frustration. It only left him feeling weaker, but he continued walking. [/QUOTE] I can't really comment on how accurate this is though, I don't write too often.

I am impressed. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/wxIN6cL.png[/IMG]

I tried giving it an entire English dictionary :v: [img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99717/SO_MANY_WORDS.png[/img]

[QUOTE=Zyx;44834155]I tried giving it an entire English dictionary :v: [img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99717/SO_MANY_WORDS.png[/img][/QUOTE] Complexity is calculated as a weighted sum of the ratio of complex words to all words and the average number of words per sentence. The complexity score is abnormally high because it considers your entire paste as one sentence. The vocabulary score seems accurate however - overall, an interesting result :)

Now, what modifications have been made to the Gunning-Fox method here? Is Aesop Rock so complex for the same reason?

Not bad. [img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27714141/complexity1.png[/img] I've noticed that you get better scores by submitting isolated excerpts.