Thursday, January 3, 2008

Manuscript Analyzer 1.0

Happy New Year, everyone! I had a very restful and recharging holiday season, and I hope you all had the same. To kick off the new year, I've finally gotten around to creating a Tools section on my website. This is a page for various little freeware programs that I create and want to publicly release, which I've been meaning to put up for ages.

As part of this new page, I'm also releasing the very first version of a new tool that I've created for writers . It's called Manuscript Analyzer, and is a pretty unique tool for aiding writers in doing some forms of analysis of their manuscripts. There are a number of programs that let you count the frequency of words in a document, but this takes it a step further and helps you identify junk phrases, "frequent offender" word patterns, and adverbs. It also lets you ignore common words that clutter up the high ranks of other word-counting programs, and allows you to focus on words by size.

Best of all, the dictionaries for all of the above can be extended by users via simple text files. This program auto-updates its dictionaries. As is noted in the "About" tab of the program itself, I'm very interested in ideas for how to extend this program even further. This is actually something that I just started coding this evening (seriously), so I'm sure there is a lot more that could be added. But I think that you'll find what's there to be quite robust and useful as it is.

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