Creating a survey/questionnaire

I am working with a group of students creating a survey. It is amazing how they have opinion questions where the respondents have to write text. How is the text meant to be analysed? All opinions should have responses in the form of a rating scale which one selects. If they have a scale the results can be presented in a valid graph. (But then again 80% of these students could not even create a graph when I first met them.)