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Wednesday 9 June 2010

Word Cloud!

Yesterday, I read this fabulous post by Angela, also known as the Slushpile Slut. Inspired by the brilliance and fun of these word clouds, I decided to try my own on Wordle

I did this purely for the fun, but it might also be useful to anyone who wants to see if they're overusing certain words in their stories. That said, believe me, if you're just looking for a fun, silly few minutes (or longer, if you want to keep throwing sections of text in), this is absolutely delightful!

My word cloud for the first five pages of ECHOES-



For a largely dialogue-free scene halfway through the book-



And for a scene near the end of the book, a scene that, by the way, just about broke my heart to write-



Useful things I've learned? Well, for one thing, I think I use the word 'just' too often. Might run a word search through the document and cut out a fair few. Not all of them, though, because I think the word fits naturally into Echo's speech and narrative pattern.

What really fascinates me about these, though, is how so many of the key words and themes in the story come through here. Words like weavers, soul, love, sculpture, never, imagine, waiting.

Conclusion? I love word clouds.
 

7 comments:

  1. Oh! I did this will my full MS not too long ago. I never thought about doing it with certain scenes. Wordle time!

    ~JD

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  2. I love word clouds, too. Aren't they fun?

    I like the last one, by the way. I want to read that chapter!

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  3. That is so funny! I just did my own word cloud for one of my manuscripts today. and I realized I probably overstate one of the character's names and that I may be using too many similes, as "Like" appears so much. Cool tool!

    And great looking site you have here!

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  4. What a cool idea! I'd love to do that with the average person's daily vocabulary just to see what words are overused with depressing frequency. I'm guessing "Like", "Kinda", "Ya Know"....
    Vix
    xxx

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  5. I just discovered word cloud too. I put two of them on my blog in the sidebar just because I thought they were pretty. Am I silly or what?
    Roland

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  6. Funny how you really can favour some words ;p

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  7. awwww BRILLIANT. I didn't know we could make those. I'm SO doing that for my writing too!

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