Rank the 361 different words of the passage by how often they appear, and the first ten cover 25.6% of the page. The first fifty cover 54.5%, and the first hundred 67.7%. None of the ten names a thing or an act: they are I, she, you, and, the, to, of, was, it and that. They hold the sentence together, and a page is built round them.
Core ideas
Three ideas about a ranked list.
On the passage, ten words fill 240 of the 936 places, which is 25.6%. Fifty words fill 54.5%, and a hundred fill 67.7%. The other 261 different words share the last 32.3%. A page is mostly the same small words, over and over, with the rest of the words as the thin part.
The passage's ten are I, she, you, and, the, to, of, was, it and that. Four are pronouns; and and that join one part of a sentence to the next; the, to and of stand in front of a noun or a verb; and was is the verb be. They carry the grammar, and they say very little about what the page is about.
The play has I first and you second, and then a name, Cecily. The modern documents, which include a report on an older population, have age itself in the ten. The shares are close, 25.6%, 24.9% and 24.7%, but the words are not the same, and the difference is the text's own subject.
The material
The list is the lab's first ten rows. Read it as a list of kinds, not as a list of words to learn.
The last lesson counted how much of a page a list covers. This one turns the question round. Ignore the list and count the page: which words appear most, and how much of the page do they fill? The answer does not depend on any list. It is a fact about the text.
The lab counts every word of the text, ranks the different ones from the commonest down, and adds up the share as it goes. The passage has 936 words and 361 different ones. The commonest, I, appears 30 times and is 3.2% of the page. The commonest ten together are 25.6%.
Three numbers sum up the shape of the list. On the passage, the ten commonest words cover 25.6%, the fifty commonest cover 54.5% and the hundred commonest cover 67.7%. On the play excerpt, with 605 different words, they cover 24.9%, 50.5% and 63.3%. On the modern documents, with 603 different words, 24.7%, 47.3% and 60.6%. The shapes are close. A quarter of a page is ten words, and about two thirds is a hundred.
Read the first ten of the passage and sort them. There are three pronouns for people, I, she and you, and it, which stands for a thing. There is and, which joins, and that, which in this passage joins too: in fourteen of its seventeen places it ties a verb to what follows (persuaded that, I find that), and in three it points (on that point). There are the, to and of, which go in front of a noun or a verb. And there is was, the past of be. Do not call it a helping verb here: the course Helping Verbs found that be is mostly a main verb, and in this passage not one of the twenty was is followed by an -ing verb. It stands before a quality (was proud), a participle (was roused) or a thing (there was a time).
This is why a quarter of a page costs a reader almost nothing, and also why knowing the ten does not get you through the page. They are the frame. The words that say what the page is about are in the other three quarters.
Text by text, the grammar part of the list stays the same and the subject part changes. In the play, the speakers' names Cecily and Algernon are in the ten. In the modern documents, age is, because a report on an older population says it again and again. The lab shows this when you switch the text, and the switch is worth making before you read the quiz.
After the hundred, the list falls steeply. The passage's 361 different words, less the first hundred, share 32.3% of the page. Many of them appear once. These are the words that say what the passage is about, and the table of words not covered, in the lesson before, lists the ones you have to look up.
Interactive
Every word of the text checked against the list, by the rules of the nine courses before
Method
Four steps.
Choose “the commonest words, ranked” under the text. The table now shows rank, word, times, and the share of the page so far.
The last number in the row for rank 10 is the share the top ten cover. Do the same at rank 50 and rank 100.
Is it a word for a thing, an act or a quality? Or is it a small word that joins, stands for another word, goes in front of a noun, or is a form of be? Count each kind.
Switch the text and read the top ten again. Which words stayed, and which are the new text's own?
Each line is a row of the lab's table: the rank, the word, how many times it appears in the 936 words, and the share of the page that the words down to it fill.
Add the ten counts: 30, 29, 27, 26, 26, 25, 21, 20, 19 and 17 make 240, and 240 of 936 is 25.6%. Not one of the ten names a thing or an act. Three are pronouns for people (I, she, you) and one for a thing (it); the rest join, stand in front of a noun or a verb, or are the verb be. And and the have the same count, 26, and the lab puts and first only because it comes first in the alphabet.
The passage is a conversation, which is why I and you are so high. Switch to the play and the ten are I (89), you (68), Cecily (64), the (51), to (47), of (38), Algernon (37), a (34), it (33) and is (31). Two of them are names, and most of those counts are the name printed before each speech. On the modern documents the ten are the (117), to, and, in, of, a, for, age (21), as and that. Nine of them are grammar words; age is the subject of the report.
You should be able to read a ranked list off the lab, work out the share the first ten, fifty and hundred words cover, name the kind of word that fills the top, and say why the top of one text is not the top of another.
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