Wordle.

Last week's blog, according to Wordle

Ah, Wordle and its "beautiful word clouds." It's like a tie-dyed concordance and a computer-charged set of poetry magnets all in one. (For those of you who don't know how this works, a concordance as presented by a word cloud gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text... so, because I was writing about "bad behavior" lately in my blog, the word bad became very large in this Wordle of my blog as it existed at the end of last week. I suspect the words book and think would stay prominent over time.)

I love "reading" these word clouds to find unexpected language. In my own Wordled blog, I found the following phrases:

"Get going right away"

"Bad readers writing final ideas"

"Behavior like two postcards"

"Sometimes always business first"

"Parents talk, still prefer self-promotion actions"

"People eventually just getting everyone reading"

"Creative characters important"

"Okay fiction"

Now, mostly this is just silly fun, but I have a suggestion for beginning writers that uses this program. Wordle your work-in-progress, then look at it. Is it what you expected? Are the names of some characters HUGE, when in fact you didn't think they got that much time on the page? Do you use fiction's "meaningless words" too often: apparently, very, or really? Or perhaps some good news... a theme of your book appears to you, written but unnoticed until now. It's suprisingly cool how much this reveals about your use of language.

Go Wordle something! Your blog, your WIP, a spam email... and come back and tell me what you think of your results! Better yet, post a link so we can all see which font, style, and colors you chose. I promise to view them all.