Wordsmith Software Writing Tool Tutorial

Wordsmith [1.0 - US - $ 9.99 - OS X 10.8 - Plow Software, LLC ] is a new word processor that self-proclaims new generation. It is true that this newcomer does not lack arguments with both a clean and surprising interface and some functions that we were not used to seeing on this segment.



At first launch, Wordsmith's sleek and elegant interface is noticed. By creating a document, you have a large text box and five icons altogether for everything: it stays well away from Word or other traditional software. The essential is devoted to the text and the management of the form and the styles is done via an inspector who does notPages ( € 15.99 ), but a small pop-up that appears after a double tap two fingers on a trackpad.



This is how Wordsmith proposes to italicize or bold, but also to create a list or title. This first version does not yet allow to modify the styles in a precise way, even if the application works with themes which take back technologies Web to modify the aspect of the document. You can download a few from the publisher's website and even create your own themes with the built-in tool.



Wordsmithwas designed for university use first and foremost and it shows. On the one hand because the software contains a sidebar that displays the entire structure of the document and allows you to freely change the order of parts or even annotate sections. You can annotate any part of the text and find the annotations in another sidebar, this time on the right.



The word processor also offers an extremely simple bibliographic reference manager, much easier than the solutions of its competitors. To add a reference, activate the Wordsmith inspectorand choose the desired type (link, book, article ...). To insert a reference to a book, you can even scan the barcode of the book in question. Software designers have thought of specific cases and you can also create your own references for any element.



Last part that makes Wordsmith an original word processor, textual analysis. The application is able to automatically detect the names and places mentioned in your document, and present them in a toolbar that appears automatically. Once the detection is done, you can quickly navigate the document to find the characters and places, while Wordsmith can correct what has been detected, in case of



For ease of reading, Wordsmith aims to emphasize the density of your text with a new kind of sidebar. This gives an indication of the length of the paragraphs and sentences of your text with squares becoming darker, and longer and longer. In this example, in the middle paragraph, there is a short sentence and then a long one: it can be identified by the color of the squares on the side.



Wordsmithis a very promising software and brings a lot of new ideas. However, it is a 1.0 version that still lacks basic functions, such as inserting images. The layout is also limited to titles and lists, we can not even define the alignment of paragraphs for the moment. Another problem to note, the software is designed by an English speaker and some functions do not seem functional by writing in French, as the detection of characters and places (we can add them manually). We also tried, unsuccessfully, the barcode scan on a French book, without knowing if it is a temporary bug or database too limited.

deserves a try for anyone who is looking for a word processor and does not need a complex layout. The application allows to export in HTML and even Markdown , a strong point for writing on the web. The default format is proprietary (an archive that contains all the data).



We regret the lack of demo version, but at 9.99 € the test is reasonable. The manual of Wordsmith is very complete and it helps to have a pretty good idea of the functions offered by the software. Be careful, OS X Mountain Lion is essential to use it.


WordSmith Software Tutorial. Level I



I. Introduction

WordSmith Tools, designed by Mike Scott, is a corpus analysis tool that includes Concord, a unilingual concordancer that displays instances of a string specified in context, in KWIC (key word in context) format. (It also offers a series of other text analysis tools that can be explored by doing the exercises on the WordList tool.) The WordSmith Tools interface is in English.

To learn more about WordSmith, visit Mike Scott's website and read the Concord help files. You can also download a demo version of WordSmith Tools (which offers all the options of the commercial version, but which limits the number of occurrences displayed to 25) from the same site .

Concord from WordSmith Tools can process texts in .html, .xml and .txt format. In addition, it offers a variety of search functions, result display modes, and statistical calculations of co - occurrences .

II. Preparation

Prepare the files you will need.
Create a subdirectory called WordSmith_Concord_I (or another name of your choice). (For instructions on this topic, see the Create a subdirectory tutorial in Windows .)
Download in this sub-directory the file containing Supreme Court of Canada decisions in French and in txt format.
Extract the files from the compressed folder into the subdirectory. (For instructions on this, see the Extracting Files from a Compressed Folder in Windows tutorial .)
Open WordSmith Tools.
When WordSmith asks if you want to see only the basic functions of the software, click No . You will have access to all the functions.
The software opens with a central window from which the various options available are accessible (the main ones from the buttons Concord (C) , KeyWords (K) and WordList (W) , the others by the menu Utilities ).

III. Choice of texts to exploit

Select one or more files to process.
In the main WordSmith window, open the File menu and click Choose texts .
In the Choose texts window that appears, the files to be exploited are displayed in the right part, and the directory tree in the left part.
A demo file provided with the software (a chapter from Dickens A Tale of Two Cities ) appears in the list on the right. Remove it by selecting it and pressing Del to avoid having occurrences from this file in your results.
From the drop-down menu in the upper-left corner of the Choose texts window , choose the drive where you stored the documents to be scanned.
You can also choose to view only files in a certain format (eg, plain text or .txt) by selecting the corresponding option from the drop-down menu that is immediately to the right of the list of readers. (See note 1.)
In the left part of the window, select all the files. (You can use the Shift key to select bulk files.)
Then click on the long vertical button with two blue arrows pointing to the right. The files appear in the right part of the window. (See note 2.)
Once the file selection is complete, exit the Choose texts window by clicking on the green check mark.

IV. Production of a concordance

Open Concord by clicking on the button that bears his name.
From the File menu , choose New .
In the Getting Started dialog box that appears, click Search word to make sure it is active. On this tab, you will see a search box at the top and, at the bottom of the tab, a reminder of some of the available search options. (See note 3.)
Type legislation in the search field, and then click OK to start the scan.
The results appear in the Concord window . Each instance of legislation appears on a separate line, with this chain aligned at the center of the line and indicated in color. The source of each occurrence is displayed to the right in the File column .
Observe the other statistics provided. WordSmith calculates the position of the occurrence displayed in the sentence, in the paragraph, in the section, and in the text, and expresses them in raw values ​​and percentages. (For example, an instance that appears at the very end of a text would have a 100% position in the sentence, paragraph, section, and text, and an occurrence at the very beginning would have a position of 0%. The raw values ​​of course vary according to the number of words in the sentence, the paragraph and the text.)
Can you think of any useful information that these statistics could provide?

V. Displaying the results

Adjust the width of the contexts by placing the cursor on the division between the Concordance and Set columns (it then takes the form of a vertical line with an arrow on each side) and pulling to the right.
Adjust the height of a line by placing the cursor on the division between that line and the one below and pulling down.
Adjust the height of all the lines of the concordance by opening the View menu and choosing the Grow or Shrink options . (Alternatively, press F8 to increase the height of the line and Ctrl + F8 to decrease it.)
If you want to see only the phrase in which the searched string appears, choose Sentence only from the View menu .
See the full text whose occurrence is drawn by double-clicking on the line in question to select it. The text is displayed on the text source tab with the occurrence of the highlighted term. Click the concordance tab again to return to the results.
Categorize some instances according to classes you have defined yourself. For example, mark in the occurrences of legislation the presence of potentially interesting cooccurrents of this unit or the type of cooccurrents present. (See note 4.)
In the Concord window , place the cursor on a line in the Set column .
Type a letter that will represent the class of the cooccurrent that you find interesting in each context. (For example, you can use n for nominal cooccurrents, v for verbals, and so on.) When you rank a context, the cursor moves to the next line.
Continue sorting occurrences by assigning a letter to each line. (At n o 7, you'll see how to sort the instances by these classes.)
Sort the results, from the Edit menu , choosing Resort . (Alternatively, press the F6 key .) The occurrences are automatically sorted alphabetically according to the Set . (Those without set appear first, followed by those annotated n and those annotated v .)
Can this kind of sorting be useful for studying the use of the unit sought? How?
Save the results of a search as an open match in WordSmith Tools.
From the File menu, choose Save .
In the dialog box that appears, choose the drive and navigate to the desired location in the file tree.
Type a file name in the field.
Click Save to save the file.
Save the results of a search as a concordance in Plain Text (.txt) format that can be viewed and edited in a word processor or imported into a database.
From the File menu , choose Save as ...> Plain text .
Click on the yellow folder to choose the desired drive and navigate to the subdirectory you created to do these exercises.
Type a file name and click Open .
Back in the Save as Plain text dialog box , click OK to save the file. (See note 5.)
Sort the occurrences according to another criterion. (See note 6.)
From the Edit menu , choose Clear set column . The added sets disappear.
From the Edit menu , choose Resort . In the Sort Match dialog that appears, you can specify up to three sorting criteria by clicking on the three tabs one by one.
File sorts the occurrences according to the source file of the occurrences.
R1 sorts the occurrences in alphabetical order according to the first word to the right of the searched string, R2 by the second word to the right and so on.
L1 sorts the occurrences in alphabetical order according to the first word on the left of the searched string, L2 by the second word and so on.
The Case sensitive box allows you to take into account the case when sorting.
Sort the results to highlight different cooccurrents of legislation . (See note 7.)
Sort the occurrences by the first word to the right of legislation by choosing R1 and clicking OK .
What cooccurrents do you identify in the contexts?
Which grammatical categories do they belong to?
Does this correspond to the labeling you have done cooccurrents in the Set column ?
How can these cooccurrents be useful to the translator or terminologist?
Sort the occurrences by the third word left of legislation .
Which option should I choose to do this sorting?
What cooccurrents do you identify in the contexts?
Which grammatical categories do they belong to?
Does this correspond to the labeling you have done cooccurrents in the Set column ?
How can these cooccurrents be useful to the translator or terminologist?
Have you identified other relevant co-relevant legislation ? Can you find a way to sort occurrences to highlight them? (See note 8.)
Eliminate irrelevant results from the list.
Click on the line in question to select it.
Press Delete to "disable" the line. (If you change your mind later, select the line and press the INS key to "reactivate" it.)
Repeat for other lines to delete.
Open the Edit menu and choose Zap to remove the disabled rows from the results. (See note 9.)
Close the concordance without saving it by choosing the Close option from the File menu and clicking the No button when asked if you want to save the file. (See note 10.)

VI. Last steps

Make a backup copy of your files or transfer them to another computer.
From Windows Workstation or the Start menu , find the subdirectory where you stored your files.
Create a compressed folder that contains this subdirectory. (For instructions on this topic, see the tutorial Create a Compressed Folder in Windows .)
Copy the compressed folder to a USB flash drive. If less than 2 MB, you can send it as an attachment to your email.