Text analysis and UsingEnglish.com

I have just subscribed to another site.  I had used various worksheets before from UsingEnglish.com but hadn't really got round to looking round the site when I'd visited it previously.

Right now, I am working on several seminars that I have coming up - most of them are on Cambridge English: Advanced, so I'm enjoying preparing activities and tips to share on all five papers - Reading, Writing, Use of English, Listening and Speaking.

Back in November, I shared with you a tool for making Word Clouds by feeding in a text to Wordsift.

I have found another very useful tool for working on and analysing texts.

I fed the following text from a CAE Reading Paper  into the Text Content Analysis Tool on the UsingEnglish.com website.

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

Time was when physicists dreamed of a final theory of fundamental physics, a perfect set of equations that would describe every force and particle in nature. Today that dream is being overtaken by the suspicion that there is no such thing. Some even fear that all attempts at a deeper understanding of nature are dead ends. This will lend support to those who have long claimed that research into fundamental physics is a waste of time and money; that at best it provides answers to obscure questions which few people understand or care about. So do these reservations undermine pure physics as a scientific pursuit? Surely, it makes no difference if the truths that physicists seek turn out to be more complex and messy than they once hoped. It could even make the search more intriguing. There are as many profound questions out

there as there have ever been, and to answer them physicists need the kind of hard experimental evidence that can only come from pure research. Can we, therefore, justify spending the huge sums of money that such research demands? What it boils down to is whether we think the search for fundamental truths is important. This quest for knowledge is a defining human quality, but it’s hard to quantify how our lives have been ‘improved’ by it. There have been plenty of technological spin-offs from the space race and other experiments. But the spin-offs are not the point. In showing us how the universe works, fundamental physics could also tell us something profound about ourselves. And for that, a few billion dollars would be a small price to pay.

After clicking on the 'calculate' button, I was impressed by the information I obtained about the text, all in a matter of seconds.















I found out that:

• The Total Word Count for the above text is 273 words.  
• 165 words appear only once in the text.  
• There are 15 sentences.  
• The average number of words per sentence is 18.2. 
• 25 of the words in the text are classed as Hard - they are three or more syllables long.

Lexical density

The text is lexically dense.  (The lexical density is 60.44%)

This is calculated by taking the total number of words in the text, dividing it by the total number of words and multiplying that by 100.

The programme also made me a Word Cloud for the text and I could sort this either alphabetically or in order of frequency of use in the text.

I then tried out the same text in the Advanced Texts Analyser (you have to be registered with the site to be able to use this).

I could then obtain:

•  graphic information about the words in the text (For example:  there are 64 four letter words and 42 of these four letter words only appear once in the text).
• information like the fact that there are 7 2-word phrases that appear more than once in the text (e.g. fundamental physics, spin offs, have been)
• 94 of the words belong to the Common Words word list.

I will certainly be trying these tools out again soon and sharing them with teachers at the CAE Reading seminar!

Hope you will try it too!