Readers’ Tips

TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT

Analyse your text for common words

I write several newsletters for various clubs and like to make sure they’re written in good English. I perform the usual grammar checks in Word, but I also paste the text into the Computer Hope site because it provides a more comprehensive analysis.

To see what I mean, visit www.snipca.com/41837 then paste your words into the box. Now click Submit at the bottom and you’ll see a list of statistics. As well as details you’d expect (number of words and characters), it tells you what the top common words (‘and’, ‘the’ etc) and top non-common words are.

I dislike long sentences, so I always look at the ‘longest sentence’ number, and the average sentence length. It even tells you