Grading the internet

March 29, 2010 11:09 AM

How can I get a count of total misspelled words on a web page and a count of total words overall?

There are a few sites that do this but they're either not working, ask for payment, have taken two hours to complete an evaluation, or seem fishy.

Failing that, if I can find an application that just rates for readability or something, that would be acceptable second choice, but I would really like to be able to get those two numbers.

Can anyone think of a another way to accomplish this?

Oh, yeah. For free. Preferably.

posted by A Terrible Llama to computers & internet (6 answers total)

The terribly lame way I've done it in the past: select all, copy:paste into Word or another text editor with spell check capability. The application gives you word count and you manually count the highlighted misspelled words.
posted by jamaro at 11:21 AM on March 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

To count the words, copy paste into word.

Use MS Word to count the words on the page.

Counting Words in a Document
To determine the number of words in a document:
1. Move the mouse to Tools, Word Count and click.
2. A dialog box appears that displays information about the document.

Count the underlined words in red manually. This would need to be double checked by user because not all underlined words are misspelled, just not in the ms dictionary.
posted by MechEng at 11:23 AM on March 29, 2010

The application gives you word count and you manually count the highlighted misspelled words.

Ah, *swoons* *passes out*

Too many pages, it'd be okay for a one-off but I need a tool.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 11:24 AM on March 29, 2010

Okay, here's some code I found online and tweaked to do what I want.

Which seems to work, paste into a module in a word doc, paste the text into the doc itself, run the macro.



Public Sub Countme()


Dim errDocument As ProofreadingErrors
Dim errSingle As Range

Dim nonErr As Integer

Set errDocument = ActiveDocument.Range.SpellingErrors

nonErr = ActiveDocument.Range.Words.Count



If errDocument.Count = 0 Then
MsgBox "No spelling errors found."
Else
MsgBox nonErr & " Total Words," & errDocument.Count & " total errors. " & Format(errDocument.Count / nonErr, "0.00000%")
End If


End Sub
posted by A Terrible Llama at 11:46 AM on March 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Can you take a random sample of the pages, and use a calculator? Like MechEng said, if you don't manually verify the misspellings, your count isn't going to be any anywhere close to accurate. Any spell-checker is going to mark almost all proper names. A site that uses proper names a lot, especially unusual surnames and place names, will appear to have a high percentage of misspellings even when it doesn't. An estimate from a verified count of misspellings on sample of pages is probably going to be more accurate than an automated count of an entire site would be.
posted by nangar at 11:51 AM on March 29, 2010

Any spell-checker is going to mark almost all proper names.

That's okay, the input is really text heavy and I think the volume will smooth out the inevitable failures. I'm not looking for the world's best math, just a general idea of how coherent the writing is.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 12:11 PM on March 29, 2010