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While looking for the link for Grammarly I came across this useful, unconnected little online gizmo:
English Syntax Highlighter - does what it says on the tin. As someone who knows what words mean and how they should sound when spoken, but who has never managed to grasp the vocabulary and rules of language itself beyond about 4th-grade level, this is an interesting and educational thingumywotsit.
If you toggle the right bits on and off, it picks out every instance of a particular type of word. The default is different colours for different types of word, all together in one big rainbow soup which my brain found about as helpful as a dose of LSD, but once I found the toggle and went one at a time - marvellous free toy. I imagine it's aimed at people learning English as a foreign language, but I can see a fic writer's use for it in spotting patterns in word distribution to understand style, or homing in on a 'problem area' in a way that's helpful to concentration. Say I think I might have boring verbs and could benefit from a thesaurus in a few places; this would let me highlight all the verbs and focus on them to the exclusion of all the other words in the passage. By toggling the highlighting on and off, I could isolate all my nouns and instantly spot if I was being repetitive, or spelling somebody's name wrong half the time.
Context is everything in fiction, of course, and looking at words in isolation won't go far, but this could really help with the fine detail. And who knows, it might finally learn me my determiner from my adposition. Plus, what a spiffy piece of coding. Kudos, coder.
English Syntax Highlighter - does what it says on the tin. As someone who knows what words mean and how they should sound when spoken, but who has never managed to grasp the vocabulary and rules of language itself beyond about 4th-grade level, this is an interesting and educational thingumywotsit.
If you toggle the right bits on and off, it picks out every instance of a particular type of word. The default is different colours for different types of word, all together in one big rainbow soup which my brain found about as helpful as a dose of LSD, but once I found the toggle and went one at a time - marvellous free toy. I imagine it's aimed at people learning English as a foreign language, but I can see a fic writer's use for it in spotting patterns in word distribution to understand style, or homing in on a 'problem area' in a way that's helpful to concentration. Say I think I might have boring verbs and could benefit from a thesaurus in a few places; this would let me highlight all the verbs and focus on them to the exclusion of all the other words in the passage. By toggling the highlighting on and off, I could isolate all my nouns and instantly spot if I was being repetitive, or spelling somebody's name wrong half the time.
Context is everything in fiction, of course, and looking at words in isolation won't go far, but this could really help with the fine detail. And who knows, it might finally learn me my determiner from my adposition. Plus, what a spiffy piece of coding. Kudos, coder.
