This tool analyzes a given text for fill words and other potentially unwanted words and expressions in scientific writing.
Outputs statistics and a list of found words with occurrence count. With the -d option it dumps the original text with the expressions being highlighted.
A list of some analyzed categories with examples can be found below. All expressions are found in the source file.
- first person perspective (I, my, we, our, ...)
- conjunctive (could, would, ...)
- transition words (but, therefore, ...)
- colloquial terms (okay, nice, stuff, ...)
- fill words (indeed, really, very, ...)
- weakening expressions (quite, most, probably, ...)
- words and adjectives with little meaning (good, right, thing, ...)
- commonly overused expression (be seen, is shown, for example, ...)
Eine Liste aller Ausdrücke befindet sich im Quellcode.
- Personalpronomen (ich, mein, wir, uns, ...)
- Indefinitpronomen (man)
- Passivformen (wurde, werden, ...)
- Konjunktivformen (sei, wäre, könne, würde, ...)
- Füllwörter (auch, meist, wohl, ...)
- Konjunktionen und Satzverbindungen (außerdem, nichtsdestotrotz, im nächsten Schritt, ...)
- häufig überbenutzte Formulierungen ("zu sehen ist", "es ergibt sich", "in dieser Arbeit", ...)
- umgangssprachliche Formen (eh, halt, irgendwas, ...)
- ungenaue Adjektive oder Wörter mit wenig Aussagekraft (gut, schlecht, einigermaßen, oft, ...)
The below program options are also displayed using the -h parameter.
usage: fillwan [options] [file]
reads from standard input if no file is provided
options:
-h | --help display this help
-l | --lang (EN | DE) language selection. English or German. Default: EN
-c | --color enable colored output
-d | --dump dump text with highlighted fill expressions
-a | --alpha sort occurrence map alphabetically, not by count
For the following commands a Unix system including the grep, cat, and less utilities is assumed.
You can either pipe text into fillwan like:
cat text.txt | fillwan
Or load the text file directly:
fillwan text.txt
Example 1: Scroll interactively through the text with the expressions being highlighted:
cat text.txt | fillwan -cd | less -RN
Example 2: Scroll through all lines containing fill expressions, show line numbers from original text
cat text.txt | fillwan -d | grep --color=always -ne "<<[^>]\+>>" | less -R
Default usage of fillwan, here showing statistics on a test text:
The following command instead dumps the text with the expressions highlighted:
Run the Makefile using make.
This program requires a compiler supporting C++20.
Installation with sudo make install.