How to Use Teachit S Cruncher

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How to use Teachit’s Cruncher

What can Cruncher do?

By collapsing texts in seconds, Cruncher reveals wonderful patterns of language that can be used for detailed analysis, greater insight, or as the inspiration for creative work.

Cruncher can be used to:

· count words

· sort words forwards

· sort words backwards

· filter out punctuation

· filter out duplicate words

· filter out small grammatical words (such as articles, and prepositions)

· count the letters and syllables of each word

· sort the letters of each word and

· list letters used in each word

· perform almost any combination of these tasks.

The results - lists of words in a variety of formats - offer a range of analytical and creative opportunities. Some of them are immediately useful. Some take a bit of thinking about. The key thing is that none of the results of Crunching deliver ‘answers’. Your students will be presented with a new way of reading the text - but the insights and applications are entirely open to them.

How to…

Choose your text - it can be of (almost) any length, although it might struggle with Great Expectations or really big texts.

· Simply copy the text (select it using your mouse, and right click Copy, or choose Copy from the Edit menu)

· Launch Cruncher from the Whizzy things pages on the site.

· Now Paste your text into the window below:

All the processes are optional, although as a default, Cruncher takes out all the punctuation marks and puts everything into lower case.

1. Simple listing

The Raw Output, simple listing option lists all the words from your text in a pop-up window.

If you want to use this collapsed version of your text, all you have to do is to copy the contents of the window and paste it back into Word.

2. No sort

This option leaves the word-order intact. It automatically deletes line-breaks. If you’ve removed punctuation and capital letters the result is a lumpen mass of text with no indication where the lines break or where the sentences begin or end.

Here’s a famous sonnet by the Bard treated in this way:

when forty winters shall beseige thy brow and dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field thy youth's proud livery so gazed on now will be a tatter'd weed of small worth held then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies where all the treasure of thy lusty days to say within thine own deep-sunken eyes were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise how much more praise deserved thy beauty's use if thou couldst answer this fair child of mine shall sum my count and make my old excuse proving his beauty by succession thine this were to be new made when thou art old and see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold

All the writer’s words are faithfully produced, but there’s no capital letters, no punctuation and no line breaks.

Perhaps you’ve just taught the class the classic Shakespearean sonnet form. You want them to practise, turn theory into practical understanding. Well, to return this block of words to its proper form will test everything you’ve told them and give them some nice puzzling moments deciding on punctuation.

Works well for prose too, and modern free verse where the students feel for how the lines should break will be arbitrary, based on taste.

3. Alphabetical listing

This is the most used option. Here’s the sonnet again with all the words simply listed in alphabetical order:

all all all-eating an and and and and answer art ask'd be be beauty beauty beauty's beauty's being beseige blood brow by child cold couldst count days deep deep-sunken deserved dig excuse eyes fair feel'st field forty gazed held his how if in it lies livery lusty made make mine more much my my new now of of of old old on own praise praise proud proving say see shall shall shame small so succession sum tatter'd the then thine thine this this thou thou thou thriftless thy thy thy thy thy thy thy to to treasure trenches use warm weed were were when when when where where will winters within worth youth's

What can you do with a text in this form?

One approach is analytical. All the words are there, but the meaning has been completely obscured. Students might be able to make an educated guess what the text is about based on clusters of words or repetition. They might deduce that it has something to do with beauty, for instance, and that someone is addressing someone else (all those repetitions of ‘thy’).

You can also experiment with the other two options, filtering out little grammatical words, and/or getting rid of duplicate words.

Some of best analytical exercises come from concentrating the text in this way to get down to the essence.

all-eating answer art asked beauty being besiege blood brow child cold count days deep deep-sunken deserved dig excuse eyes fair feel'st field forty gazed held lies livery lusty made make mine more much new old praise proud proving shall shame small succession sum tatter'd thriftless treasure trenches warm weed winters worth youth

The other approach is creative - to use the text as a ‘quarry’. Encourage students to write their own poem based on the same vocabulary set, and before they are familiar with this text. The results will give you fascinating insights into word-associations and so on.

4. Spreadsheets

Hit the Spreadsheet button and you’ll see an online spreadsheet that can be sorted using the column headings and read, a page at a time, using the Previous and Next page buttons. You won’t need all the data columns, but here are some ideas:

· Use the Sorted column to find anagrams

· Make puzzles with the Letters column

· Use Count to see the frequency of the word in the text

To use this data, simply click on the green Excel icon, and copy (Ctrl+A to select it all and then Ctrl+C to copy it).

Open up Excel. Click in the top left hand cell and select Paste from the Edit menu.

5. Rhyme Listing

This variant takes a bit of getting used to - unless you’ve used a rhyming dictionary before. Here’s the sonnet, without duplicates:

a ask'd tatter'd weed deserved gazed held field child old cold and blood proud be made see beseige the make shame thine mine where were more treasure praise use excuse if of dig being all-eating proving much worth all shall small will warm sum an then when deep-sunken in within on succession own so to deep answer fair youth's beauty's trenches lies eyes his this winters thriftless days it count art feel'st couldst thou new how now brow say by thy my livery forty lusty beauty

At first glance it’s difficult to see how the text has been arranged. You need to look at the last letters of each word and read backwards. So, ‘beauty’ ends in ‘y’ so it is placed at the end of the list, ‘a’ ends in ‘a’ so it’s at the beginning.

The fascinating aspect of this method of sorting is that it arranges the words by suffix. You can put a Shakespeare play into Cruncher and in a few moments read off all the words ending in -ly, or all the words ending in –ed, harvesting adverbs and regular verbs in a few seconds. It offers a unique insight into a text.