Ugh rather succinctly sums up how I’m feeling today, and so it’s my U word.
I feel like I’m coming down with something so I’m going to try and take it easy today, but my to-do list is pretty big so we’ll see how successful I am.
So, what’s a girl to do on an Ugh day when she still has to blog? Wordle!
My daughter, Danica, first introduced me to Wordle when she was using it for a school project but Peggy Eddleman reminded me about it in her blog post this morning. Wordle makes spiffy word clouds out of whatever words or URL you tell it to check out. Today I went and dumped the entire text of Shadows in to see what the results would look like. Voila:
In addition to being a lot of fun, I can see several practical uses for Wordle. For example, if you do like I did and dump your novel into it you’ll be given a glance of what your saying the most, which may help you identify themes or problems. If your story is about vampires, for example, but the word unicorn is the biggest one in the cloud, you may have a problem 🙂
You can also plug an rss feed url in and see the keywords for a blog. I did it with my blog and was quite surprised by the results:
It turns out I’m not blogging about what I thought I was. This is something I’ll have to look at again when this month is over and my ability to think coherently has returned. In the meantime, pretty!
~*~
This blog post is part of the Blogging from A to Z challenge over the month of April and was brought to you by Peggy Eddleman and the letter U. Tomorrow I’ll be blogging about video games. Or, that’s the plan at least.
That is so cool! Now I’m going to have to go play with it. I love that it plucks out the most used words…that’s going to be so helpful for me when I get around to finishing the edit on my Nano project. And…it is pretty…like you said. 🙂
Yeah, it’s not often that you get to combine pretty and useful in one thing LOL
Yes, I know about Wordle. Thanks for the reminder though. I needed that. Thanks for the visit over at my place earlier. *waving*
It was my pleasure, on both counts 🙂
I LOVE Wordle! I actually use it for my weekly Word Cloud Wednesday posts.
It’s addictive though, isn’t it? 😉
Word Cloud Wednesday posts? That sounds like a lot of fun, I’ll have to look ’em up when I’m at your site next.
Never heard of Wordle, but I’m going to try it! Knowing my luck LIQUOR will be bold all caps front and center.;)
LoL well if you *have* to, you can always right click on a word to take it out 😉
Wordle is so cool. Love the one about your blog – it IS pretty.
Thank you 🙂 I really liked it.
Thanks for your post & I’m feeling a bit ‘ugh’ today too, so am taking it easy. I love Wordle too, but hadn’t really thought about how to use it & thanks for giving me some ideas.
I hope you’re feeling a bit better now. Thank you for stopping by 🙂
I’ve seen this but haven’t used it yet. I’m afraid if I do this with my ms, my biggest words will be ‘just’, ‘as’, and ‘was’. Plus ‘said’. Hey, ignorance is bliss.
LoL I think it pulls out all the ‘the’ ‘a’ ‘and’ ‘said’ -type words for you 🙂
I forgot about wordle. I should try running my blog through it again (when the month is over)