Saturday, April 10, 2010

More Tools for Writers

Writers will do anything to keep from writing when they hit a wall...
I wanted a word progress meter and found that several no longer work. In searching I found a couple cool tools.

Conflict Generator I asked for 8 random conflicts and this is what I got:

Ambition
Crime Pursued by Vengeance
Descension
Murderous Adultery
Rescue
Conflict with a God
Adultery
Abduction

Using the Readability Tool I pasted some of an old book into the readability box and this is the result:

Reading Levels
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 3.5 grade
ARI (Automated Readability Index): 4.6 grade
Coleman-Liau 7.3 grade
Flesch Reading Ease: 88.4/100
Gunning fog index: 6.6 grade
Laesbarhedsindex (LIX) Formula: 29.0 = below school year 5
SMOG Index: 7.4 grade
Average grade level: 5.9 (mean of above grade levels)

Sentence Information
Number of characters: 1383
Number of words: 313
Characters per word: 4.42
Syllables per word: 1.27
Number of sentences: 30
Words per sentence: 10.4
Number of short sentences: 11 (37%, 5 words or less)
Number of long sentences: 4 (13%, 20 words or more)
Number of paragraphs: 1
Sentences per paragraph: 30.0
Number of questions: 6 (20%)
Number of passive sentences: 8 (27%)
Longest sentence: 31 words long
Shortest sentence: 1 word long

Word Usage
Number of to be verbs: 9
Number of auxiliary verbs: 4
Number of conjunctions: 14 (4% of words)
Number of pronouns: 51 (16% of words)
Number of prepositions: 25 (8% of words)
Number of nominalizations: 3

Sentence Beginnings
Pronouns: 13
Interrogative pronouns: 0
Articles: 3
Subordinating conjunctions: 3
Conjunctions: 1
Prepositions: 0

Interesting eh?

2 comments:

Bill Kirton said...

Fascinating, especially the conflict generator. As for the rest, well, I guess you now know exactly what you need to do. (My own suggestion would be - stop reading those bloody statistics and start writing.)

Anonymous said...

I'm there. As soon as I reformat both macs and install Snow Leopard. Actually the ruminations did some good. I finally realized that, yes, after I finish this book I may have to nearly rewrite it or write a completely different book.

I'm so efficiency oriented (although I'm not necessarily efficient) that I hate to waste words. This trait translates into too much thinking and not enough pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. Thanks for the push, &;-)).

I'll go with what I have in my head and then see if I can make it 'larger' on the second pass.