I would <3 a stylistics computer program

I want to own a computer program that does Corbette and Conner’s stylistic analysis on writing. That would have saved me hours and hours of time when I was working on my thesis. And if such a program exists, I think it should not cost an arm and leg. I vote open source. Though, if a stylistic analysis program was created open source would it be valued as much in the academic community as say a program created and sold? When using it for research purposes would it matter? If only I could find a linguist and a computer programmer to create such a program… I have seen some programs in the linguistics depts that seem to do what I would want them to do, but would also have cost me my house to purchase and use. And even then, I would still have to "tell/train" the computer exactly what to look for.

Though I would support I program to analyze writing for purposes other than grading and placement, I would still need a little convincing. Such programs, such as the stylistic analysis, would save me hours/days (I analyzed 92 college writing 1 diagnostic essays…. It literally took FOREVER), it still, as the articles mentioned, leaves out the subject aspect and not everything with regard to writing in objective. Even labeling nouns as concrete or not could change based on a human vs. computer. But then again, the computer could easily count nouns, pronouns, finite verbs, compound sentences, complex sentences, simple sentences, ect. It really does come down to the purpose of the program and the why and for what? Computer grading though, that scares me a bit. Mostly because it is so objective. What about seeing student improvement from paper to paper, how would a computer judge that? Would it come down to syntactic maturity? I <3 stylistics, but not in the sense to use it as a means to judge writing improvement.

I have a number of questions that deal with assessment in general. But, my first question to you is how many of you use end of the semester portfolios? I ask because, it was in the readings, and because I used them my first semester teaching, hated them, but am thinking that maybe I didn’t do it right and am considering trying it again. It sounds so warm and fuzzy, but , for me, in practice it was miserable. My students didn’t revise until the night before they were do (as they all said in their reflection papers), and that seemed to be so counter to what I heard portfolios could do. And, then, it could have just been my execution of portfolios. Thoughts on portfolios?