I came across Paper Rater after one of Richard Byrne's posts on plagiarism tools from August 2010. He recently ran an updated post on eight resources for detecting and preventing plagiarism in June 2012 and Paper Rater is still on his list.
From Paper Rater's About page:
PaperRater.com is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. PaperRater.com is used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to help students improve their writing. PaperRater.com combines the power of natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, information retrieval (IR), computational linguistics, data mining, and advanced pattern matching (APM). We offer the most powerful writing tool available on the internet today.
Since I am taking a short course and creating Lab Reports in APAv6 I thought I would give Paper Rater a try. Enter the title of your paper, copy and paste the text of your paper in the text box, copy and paste your references, bibliography, and works cited in the Reference box. Then select the education level of this paper's author, the type of paper you are submitting, originality detection (optional), and read and agree to the terms of service.
Depending on the amount of text inserted, report type selected, and your network connection the results will display. You have the option to print a summary of your results or step through the recommendations.
Paper Rater will check your submission for plagiarism, spelling, grammar, style, vocabulary and give you an opportunity to like them on Facebook. I would put them in a circle if they were on Google+. Depending on the type of paper you submit there is an option to view a grade. Selecting Lab Reports does not produce a grade but I can select Research Paper and the Grade option is available.
The additional components that I like about Paper Rater are:
Bad Phrase Score which is based on the number and quality of trite or inappropriate words, phrases, and cliches found in your paper.
The Style section includes the transitional words score, sentence length, and word usage.
Transitional Words Score based on quality of transitional phrases used within your paper.
The Sentence Length section provides a summary that includes sentence info includes character count, number of words, average length, characters=syllables, number of sentences, average length, percent and number of short sentences, percent and number of long sentences, number of paragraphs, average sentence length, number of questions, and percent and number of passive sentences, and the number of the words in the longest and shortest sentence.
The Word Usage section provides a summary of verb types which include: to be and auxiliary then calculates the percentage of conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, and nominalizations and sentence beginnings which include the number of pronouns, interrogative pronouns, articles, subordinating conjunctions, conjunctions, and prepositions.
The Vocabulary Score section provides a vocabulary score, vocabulary word count, percentage of vocabulary words, and a list of vocabulary words used. They recommend their vocabulary builder to improve just one word a day in your vocabulary to encourage you to improve your vocabulary score to 60, which will make your paper stand out.
So if you have a paper that you want analyzed, give Paper Rater a try. The site provides a different perspective of your writing.
Paper Rater has a user suggestion improvement site, a blog and a Facebook page. I would like to add Paper Rater to a Google+ circle if they were there.
What is your favorite part of Paper Rater? Are you using it with thesis/dissertation assignments, blog posts, biography, correspondence, book reports, movie or book reviews? Comments, recommendations, reaction box checks, and +1s are always welcome.
I am taking a 5 week course with East Carolina University and the course funded by my employer for my particular career field, CP 32, Training, Capability, and Doctrine Warfighting Developers. I am never one to turn down learning opportunities particularly if they have value added to my career field and my cost is more in my time than currency. I consider my time extremely valuable and learning something new everyday is great, but every now and then you need to be the formal documented student.
For subscribers to the blog, you are aware of my extremely painful decision to put my doctoral studies on hold for the sake of family issues. If this is the first time visiting the blog based on the class assignment, "Welcome!".
For the final assignment, one option is to blog. The blog can be on any topic and must contain at least three entries. This has been a class full of web based experiments and writing. We hit the ground running and will not stop until July 26.
So one of the three posts required for the assignment is this one. If you have not seen my blog posts come through the stream lately it is because the days and hours are filled with work, school, and family.
So whether you are new to blogging, given up on blogging, or a seasoned blogger, like those in the blog list on the right that I subscribe to..."Why blog?" For those that know me, the better question is "Why not blog?"
Here are a few links from my knowledge sharing passionistas that I connect with by reading their blogs, following them on Twitter, Google+, or Linkedin, or maybe all of them. Thanks to my personal and professional learning network (PLN) there is not one day that I do not learn something from, because, or in spite of you. It is not possible to list and describe every blog that impacts my digital footprint. In no particular order:
Principal Eric Sheninger's blog, A Principal's Reflections (2012), Why Blog?
Steven Downes, Half an Hour (2009), Blogging in Education
Will Richardson, Weblogg-ed (2004), The Blogging in Schools Question
OEDb, Top 100 Education Blogs (n.d.)
Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Teacher
Richard Byrne, Free Technology For Teachers
US Army Combined Arms Center
I could probably write a blog post once a week on how blogging (individual and collaborative) has impacted my life, fulfilled my autodidactism needs, improved my writing, reading, comprehension, connected me with people and information that I would not have a chance to in the F2F environment, share good and bad news, provide an outlet for those who do not have another method to "just get it out", provide a personal audit trail of information, share lessons learned...and many more reasons. Hmmm...maybe an idea for the next homework blog post.
Thanks again to those people supporting my web experiments during this short, fun, and productive class.
Comments, recommendations, reaction box checks, and +1s are appreciated.
For one of my assignments I had to narrow down my ideas and list research areas of interest and potential research topics. Like many students I hit times in my day or night when I struggle with writer's block. To kick off ideas and have some fun I like to throw ideas and key words into Wordle or peruse the Wordle gallery.
So here a couple of the results.
I modified the number of words to use, different layouts, and palettes, but creating the Wordle helped jump start my writing for the homework assignment.
How do you use Wordle?
