deliciously simple web design & creatively technical writing

Just a tiny little writing tool…

I’ve been working on a larger software project for a while now, and I’ve still got quite a bit of work to do on that before the thing is ready for release, so being stuck on one thing and not being able to release anything for a while now has driven me silly. So I took a day off from that yesterday and wanted to just work on something else: particularly something that would allow me to practice working with regular expressions: which is a programming concept that is particularly hard to master.

It’s a simple writing analysis tool.

http://writingtool.heroku.com/

This is less than a day’s worth of work, so it’s not a polished product or anything. It’s more of a proof of concept. It’s very buggy and limited right now, which is why its up on the awesome free Heroku Rails Hosting Service and doesn’t have a real name yet.

The ultimate idea with this, which I intend to develop more fully as a side project, is that you’ll be able to analyze how you write and view style choices and word tendencies and the like.

Right now, it’s limited to just a few features….

* It counts how many characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs are in a bit of submitted text.

* Shows average word length (to see how smart you are, I guess).

* Shows which words are repeated the most and how many times. (useful to avoid redundancy)

* Counts “ego” words such as “I, me mine, I’m, I’d, I’ve”. The reason for this is that I want to check my writing for “usefulness”. If I’m too frequently using terms such as “I”, I’m not doing the best job I can imparting information of value instead of feelings.

* Counts “valley-girl” style terms such as “like”, “totally”, etc. Just to check my writing for good style.

* You can also give comments on people’s writing if you wish.

* Has a section for other people’s writing resources.

It’s nothing all that extravagant right now, but I wanted to release something….anything and work on something else for a change. As mentioned, it is still very buggy, doesn’t analyze text with complicated syntax properly, and all sorts of problems, but is just a quick proof of concept.

Here are a few random speeches I’ve put through the thing….

Part of Jesus’s Sermon on the mount
Part of the Money Speech from Atlas Shrugged
Part of Harrison Bergeron, a famous short story.

Feel free to try it out and offer any suggestions or comments if you have any.

That’s all. Have a nice day.

Posted on April 10th, 2008 by Chris Papadopoulos.

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Comments

  1. friarminor (1 comments.) @ Apr 11

    Very impressive what you’ve created here, Chris!

    Would love something like that on the Morph eXchange, too. Something you can offer as SaaS later on.

    Having trouble finding a name for it? Uhmm, can I offer ‘Inkling’ as a play on traditonal writing (tribute to ink) and inkling as it gives you clues to the words and sentences you’re creating.

    Best.
    alain

  2. Chris Papadopoulos @ Apr 11

    Thanks Alain.

    As mentioned, it’s nothing too extravagant right now. I just wanted to work on something else as I still have a long way to go with my current larger project and needed a break from that.

    I’ll probably continue working on this as a side project, but it’s not really my main focus right now.

  3. Selina @ Apr 30

    wow!! Very impressive

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