Forums/Vocabulary Worksheet Factory Community/Tips and Tricks
The Magic Distiller - Convert Text to a Word List
Robert Inch
posted this on July 24, 2011 07:21
You can make a word list for Vocabulary Worksheet Factory 3 from a passage of text quickly by using the Magic Distiller.
The text you want to convert must be saved as a text-only file (.txt). (If the text has been saved in a word processing or spread sheet program, consult that program's Help for creating a .txt file.)
- In Vocabulary Worksheet Factory 3 open the Word List Editor and click Tools, Magic Text Distiller.
- An Open dialog box will appear. Locate the text file (.txt) file you want to use, then click Open.
- Words will be selected automatically from the text, based on the options you have selected (see Tools, Options for the minimum characters in a word settings). By default, any word with 3 letters or more will be taken from the text and placed in the word list grid.
- Edit the word list. Remove any words you do not want and add clues.
- Click the Spell Checker to check all fields for spelling errors.
- Finally, Save the word list before closing the Word List Editor dialog box.
The new word list is now ready to be used on your worksheets!
Comments
it'd be great if the distiller could have an option to extract CHUNKS based on certain grammar patterns or as per a reference file containing a list of common language chunks.
rgs,. Steve
Sorry Steve, could you give us some examples of grammar patterns/language chunks?
The Magic Distiller is a way to take some text and create a quick word list. Would your suggestion still select words to create a word list?
Thanks!
Yes it would still create a 'word list' or we could say a 'phrase list' or 'chunk list' or 'collocation list'.
Creating a word list has its beneficial uses. However, there are also benefits to creating lists of grammar chunks that will help students see which words usually go together.
for example: 'ran out of money' is an idiomatic chunk. The distiller could currently extract all 4 words whereas it'd be good if we could also extract say:
ran out
ran out of money
Thanks
Steve
So, if I understand you correctly, you want to be able have phrases distilled from blocks of text.
Currently the distiller is pretty basic - a word begins and ends with a blank character, so a "word" is a set characters proceeded and followed by a blank character. The distiller may have a few more things it looks at (i.e. punctuation characters), but other than that a "word" is identified by the placement of blank characters.
Of course, phrases are based on language. Thus, you mentioned "...reference file containing a list of common language chunks...". Is that reference file something that the person using the software would develop?
And ultimately, these phrases would be saved as word list files, and you would use the phrases with the Word List worksheets.
Have I got this all sorted out correctly?
Thanks Steve!