Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage
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Concordancer

A concordance program can be a handy tool for you to learn about the patterns of vocabulary, grammar, and style in your work or the work of others. This concordancer allows you to search a text file for a "key word in context." You must upload your file to the Papyr.com server first. An easy file upload utility is ready for you with the Concordancer. (See the upload utility below.) Sample texts and suggested exercises are presented as well.

Concordancer instructions:

(See also sample texts and suggested uses further below.)

1. Upload a text file with the utility below to the Papyr.com server. (Files must be plain text only and 50Kb or smaller.)
2. Enter the name of your uploaded file in the 'Data file' area — for example essay1.txt — of the concordancer.
3. Click on the LOAD button. Wait for the status box to say, 'Now loading... Done.'
4. Type in the phrase, word, mark of punctuation or other part of a word that you wish to see in its context.
5. Type in the span of the concordance output. The numbers represent the numbers of characters (letters and spaces) either side of the search term. The default number of characters is 30.
6. Click on SEARCH.
7. If there are instances of your search term in the text, they will appear in the box. It is possible to copy and paste the results into a word processor.
8. Note that new search results are added to previous search results. Click on CLEAR to delete previous search results from the concordancer.

Concordancer Upload Utility (plain text [.txt] files only) Upload data file: (50 Kb maximum)

The HyperTextBooks: Concordancer

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You can experiment with any of the files below already uploaded to the server. Just type their file names into the 'Data file' area of the concordancer, and click on the LOAD button. Pay attention to upper and lower case in the file names: the concordancer is case sensitive. Ygb.txt is not the same as ygb.txt to the concordancer.

1. bloom.txt: an excerpt of Molly Bloom's monologue from James Joyce's Ulysses
2. chaucer.txt: the opening lines of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
3. riders.txt: an excerpt of John Millington Synge's play in one act — Riders to the Sea
4. ygb.txt: an excerpt of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown"
5. chicago.txt: Chicago Poems, the complete collection of poems originally published in 1916 by Carl Sandburg. It includes such well-known poems as "Chicago," "Fog," "The Plowboy," and "The Harbor."
6. darkness.txt: the complete text of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

This concordancer allows you to search a text file for a "key word in context." In other words, the concordancer will display for you every instance of a search term in context — n characters to the left and right of the search term. The default n is 30 characters, but you can adjust that to almost anything you prefer. However, the search term does not need to be a word. The search term could be a phrase (such as at this point in time), a part of a word (such as ing), a single letter, or even a mark of punctuation.

Exercise 1: Search for a point of view shift.

Often writers use the second person pronoun you to refer to people generally, as in You will often find that others are quite helpful if you would only ask. There is nothing wrong or improper using the pronoun you in that sentence if the writer were writing directly to a specific audience, one reader, perhaps, as in a personal letter where a father is giving advice to a daughter. But if this sentence were in an essay about the kindness of strangers, and if the writer meant people in general (as in People generally will find that others are quite helpful if they would only ask), then the writer has committed a point of view shift error. You can search your own documents for point of view shifts of this sort by uploading a file and searching for the word you. As you read through the list of second person pronouns in your text, ask yourself if you meant to address your readers directly or if you really meant people generally.

Exercise 2: Search for transitional elements.

After studying the types of coherence and cohesion devices in English, search for those devices in your own documents, and compare that to some other texts or other writers you admire. In your work, do you find that you use one kind of cohesive device more than others? Do you use cohesive patterns only at the beginning of sentences or the beginnings of paragraphs, or do you use cohesive devices elsewhere too?

Exercise 3: Study beginnings and endings of sentences.

Rather than search for a word, search for the beginning and endings of your sentences by looking for a full stop (also known as a period) and a empty space (by tapping the space bar), i.e., .   In this way, you can isolate just the beginnings and endings of your sentences into a list. Why? Remember from our discussion of style that the beginnings and endings of sentences are particularly important for writers. Do you end sentences with new information and "semantically-rich" words like nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs? Are you ending sentences with "semantically-poor" words, such as pronouns or prepositions? Also do you begin sentences with cohesive links to earlier ideas? The concordancer might help you see the patterns in your own work.

If you would like to explore how changing vocabulary or punctuation might improve or provide insights into your own writing, look also at the find and replace utility and the suggestions for more experiments with writing style you can find there. Please feel free to email me with your ideas and suggestions for more exercises or uses you find for the concordancer.

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