Automates many of the tasks associated with quantitative discourse analysis of transcripts containing discourse including frequency counts of sentence types, words, sentences, turns of talk, syllables and other assorted analysis tasks. The package provides parsing tools for preparing transcript data. Many functions enable the user to aggregate data by any number of grouping variables, providing analysis and seamless integration with other R packages that undertake higher level analysis and visualization of text. This affords the user a more efficient and targeted analysis. 'qdap' is designed for transcript analysis, however, many functions are applicable to other areas of Text Mining/ Natural Language Processing.