Discussion 5 :)

For our fifth entry we were asked to look for articles on Concordance and summarize them. The following is the URL to my concordance article and my summary :)

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/conc2.htm

Concordance

A concordance is basically used to bring together or concord passages of text which show the use of a word. It is an index arrangement and is similar to that of a verbal index found at the back of textbooks. the difference is the index of a textbook will show words in alphabetical order but only refer to them, however in a concordance each word is shown together in the context from which it came.

this term is usually applied to literary and linguistics studies. It helps students access a piece of text non-sequentially or to study the ways in which it uses the language. A concordance can also be used as a cross-reference, for example a variable name, across all the files which make up a project.

It is very useful for studying even a piece of literature, when thinking in terms of a particular word, phrase or theme. It shows exactly how often a word occurs or even how it does not occur in this sense it can be extremely helpful in building up some idea of how different themes recur within a piece of literature and how it relates to the rest of the text. it is easier to see how often a word reappears by using a concordance. once  a person clicks on a relevant letter of the alphabet, a list of words will come up and it is easy to scroll down until you find the right one. 

In this case a concordance is like a computer, I finds thinks for you however you are left to do the thinking and analyzing for yourself. It helps keep a person on track, in this case, it comes to deeper analysis of a piece of text.An interactive concordance will also find answers to specific queries and produce lists of all instances of words or phrases, but the advantage is the speed and the fact the concordance will find all words, not necessarily possible in textual concordancing.

In my humble opinion,

Concordance can indeed be very useful in Literature, this I gather from the article above. A closer examination of a text can be done once the context of each word and how it is used is brought to our attention. That way one may never miss out on a hidden meaning to a text that could be hidden within the context of the poem or story. Surely it makes the analysis of a text much easier as every world is arranged neatly making room for mistakes very slim.