right i've done that now and it has solved the problem, which gives me another one.
The pointer stored in root->next is the memory address of the next word which I know is correct, although it seems to think the pointer is null. why would this happen?
Edit: it seems it does test the words but then doesn't seem to call the function again, what I want it to do is test whether or not the word entered by the user is in the list and how many times it occurs.
Edit: Edit: it searches through the list now but seems to get a pointer error on the last node I think.