Assessing Word Variance

November 27, 2010 11:10 AM

There is a term for the mathematical assessment of word variance in a piece of writing. If I could remember that term, I could search for software (or web apps) to determine this metric in my own writing, to be sure I'm not falling into the habit of being overly repetitive. Can you help? For extra points, is there an app to help me spot close-together word repetitions (which must be corrected)? I'm on a Mac, fwiw.
posted by Quisp Lover to Writing & Language (8 answers total)

concordance?
posted by lampshade at 11:12 AM on November 27, 2010

They're not specifically about word variance, but maybe something like Flesch-Kincaid readability or the Gunning fog index is what you're looking for?
posted by suedehead at 11:14 AM on November 27, 2010

To follow up, if it is "concordance", there are a number of apps out there, but I only know of the Win apps.
posted by lampshade at 11:17 AM on November 27, 2010

Maybe a word frequency counter would help?
posted by amyms at 11:24 AM on November 27, 2010

tf-idf ? and if so, can you tell me what tool you use for it? ;)
posted by ansate at 11:28 AM on November 27, 2010

Not sure I can answer the question, but words/fields that might be revelant: Content Analysis ; Informetrics; Bibliometrics; Quantitative Comparative Linguistics. If none of those help, try a google scholar search for "computation word variance texts" for more keywords.
posted by Ahab at 11:44 AM on November 27, 2010

cusum?
posted by scruss at 1:40 PM on November 27, 2010

Levenshtein distance?
posted by AmbroseChapel at 2:02 PM on November 27, 2010