ghoti

A Wordsmith Tools discussion list

Mike Scott, the creator of Wordsmith Tools has a mailing list by that name. The archive is open to public, but to post one must become a member of the list, pending approval.
Two useful pages for Range program

Here are two useful pages I found about Paul Nation’s Range program: BNC spoken freq TV as language teacher
Fixing the ‘Range check error’ in Range

I finally got Paul Nation’s Range program to work with my base word files, thanks to S.F.. The problem was in the fact I had unnecessary tabs and carriage returns between word families. But not having a digit after each word (like the original files) didn’t seem to affect the program’s performance.
Speaking isn’t the key

… most students learn how to speak English by actually speaking it. This comment original made in a letter to a Taiwanese newspaper about how teachers should make sure students produce a lot of L2 language while in classroom echoes the sentiment and attitude of many teachers in Japan. It could well have been a…
Corsis corpus tool

Corsis (formerly Tenka Text) is a now an open source project at Sourceforge. It is a freeware designed to look and feel like the commercial software and corpus tool standard, Wordsmith Tools. For more details and download see the Corsis main page.
Wildcards

This tutorial will look at ways to make more specific search terms by using wildcards in Antconc. So you have found an interesting word to focus on… a verb perhaps. The problem is verbs have more than one form. The verb “play”, for example, also has forms such as “plays” (the thirds person singular), “playing”…
Concordancing

This tutorial will look at some of the ways to enhance your concordance searches and views for Antconc. So you have made concordance lines. But you cannot see any “pattern” in the lines. What you need to do is sort them. Sort Under the Search Term box are some controls labeled “KWIC sort”. KWIC stands…
Opening files; word list; concordance

This tutorial will teach you the basics of using the Antconc concordancer. Run the Antconc program. In order to analyse a corpus we need to 1) open a file or files, 2) make a word list of it, and 3) make concordance lines. Strictly speaking making a word list is not a necessary step in…
How to convert Word Document files into plain-text files

In order to use the contents of a Word Document (“.doc” or “.docx” extension) in a concordancer it must be converted or saved as a plain text file (“.txt” extension). I will outline two different ways you can do this below. Method 1 (recommended) open the document in Word, do a “select all” (ctrl+A), “copy”…
Spicelogic – doc to txt converter

This is a document to plain text converter called spicelogic. I am not sure how secure it is but should be OK because it is from http://www.download.com.