Hey, Literature Majors...some help here?

[Iolaus]

In my critical reasoning class, the prof has something he calls "The Method" for analyzing a text, part of which involves counting how many time words are used in a text, which can get really tedious. Is there some site or program I can use that I can just plug a text into, and have it count and rank the words automatically? It seems like a brainless task like that could be done easily by a computer, and since he claims that this is a common technique, I would bet someone's written such a program already.