I find grammar checkers and other aids tedious and, frankly, of little help. For my mother tongue of English they are too basic and prescriptive, and for the other languages which I can understand rather less they are too advanced. Wouldn’t it be good to have a tool which provided interactive language support, rather than trying to inflict its own ideas on your writing?

My free app Nalaprop now does exactly that. Type your text into its lefthand pane, and each time that you press Command-Return ⌘⏎ it parses all the text that you have written, and shows which words are nouns, which verbs, and so on. That gives you insight into how you are structuring your sentences, and how heavily your style is relying on different parts of speech.

When you then want to look at your use of different words, this new version offers two different options: it can simply give you word frequencies by lexical class, or it can use lemmas or word ‘roots’ instead.

In the first (and most common) scheme, the words is, are and be are all treated as different words. However, it is usually more useful to see them analysed by lemma instead: in that, is, are and be are all counted as the verb root be.

All it takes to get the lemmatised word frequency list is two clicks: one on the MultiParse button, and then on List. You can save those frequency lists, which are valuable when studying literary texts.

This new version of Nalaprop, which only runs on Mojave, is available from here: nalaprop10b8
and from Downloads above.

I hope that you find it useful.