WordSmith 5.0 FAQs -- Answers

Is there an important difference between a key word with a keyness of 50 and another of 500?
Suppose you process a text about a farmer growing 3 crops (wheat, oats and chick-peas) and suffering from 3 problems (rain, wind, drought). If each of these crops is equally important in the text, and each of the 3 problems takes one paragraph each to explain, the human reader may decide that all three crops are equally key and all three problems equally key. But in English these three crop-terms and weather-terms vary enormously in frequency (chick-peas and drought least frequent). WordSmith's KW analysis will necessarily give a higher keyness value to the rarer words. So it is generally unsafe to rely on the order of KWs in a KW list.