Nice ego-boost

[robinturner]

Now this is what I like to see when I open my inbox ...

Your work on this app is amazing! I've shown it to a couple of my coworkers and their jaws dropped!

Comments

[vret.livejournal.com]

Whew! That's a relief. Lucky you remembered that.

Anyway, what does this app do exactly? I looked up the word list last week and I gathered that it contains the subset of words that tend to appear in all types of academic papers (excluding those that appear in one discipline and not others). I wasn't sure whether it excludes words that also appear in general publications.

Am I right in thinking that your app determines the number of words that appear in the paper and in the list? If so, are multiple appearances counted once?

Anyway, what does it tell you exactly?

[solri.livejournal.com]

It counts the number of words that appear in the academic word list (classifying them by sublist) counting multiple occurrences, divides by the total number of words, then outputs it as a per thousand figure. It does the same thing with the General Service List, which contains the 2000 most common words in English (it's actually somewhat out of date, which is why "sex" turns up as an academic, not a common word!). Finally it looks at the ratio between the two to give an off-the-cuff comment.