Apr
20
Why Haven’t I blogged about Wordle before?
April 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment
I’ve known about Wordle for quite some time and it’s so good that I’m not sure why I haven’t blogged about it before. Maybe it’s because so many other bloggers seem to use it. However it is about time that I drew attention to it for the benefit of any creative bloggers that want to use it. Often the best ideas are simple, and Wordle fits that mould perfectly. It’s a visual representation of a piece of writing with the most commonly used words displayed prominently. It’s almost poetic, and definitely artistic in its output. Here is the last few articles written on this blog displayed as a Wordle:
Image credit: Under a Creative Commons license from Wordle
I can change colour and font, orientation and whether I want comon usage words to be displayed, or not. Ideas for use:
- Analysing vocabulary in stories – will highlight repetition;
- Picking out key ideas from text (try it on an INSET);
- Concrete poetry – just collect words about a subject and feed into Wordle: Do this in groups and collect the vocab into a single document so that words which are common to each group get more prominence.
- And loads more…