Since it is my birthday this weekend I thought I would do a post on something fun.

Wordle is a great little website that allows you to create word clouds with any text. All you have to do is copy and paste the text you want and Wordle automates a word cloud for you. The more frequent words show up as bigger text. You can then play around choosing a colour scheme and font. Just for fun copy paste your current writing into Wordle and see what you get. Here is what the first draft of my current wip looks like as a Wordle:

Katie, my main character, shows up as the most frequent word.

Wordle automatically takes out common English words like ‘the’ and ‘and’, although if you go to ‘language’ you can add those words back in (I tried it and ended up with ‘the’ and ‘and’ taking up nearly the whole Wordle). You can also remove individual words from the Wordle yourself if you want by right-clicking on them. I took out all the character names from mine to see what it would look like without them. Here is what it looked like:

‘Asked’ and ‘one’ now stand out the most.

While it is fun to make Wordles for your wip (or any other text for that matter), they are also a neat little way to see if there are any words you are overusing in your writing. For example, when I look at the Wordle of my first draft (the one without the character names) I can see the word ‘just’ stands out far more than it should, so now as I edit I am looking for instances where I’ve used ‘just’ so I can cut down on its use in my novel. Wordle also has an option where you can look at exactly how many times each word in your text is used. My highest frequency word was ‘the’, which I used over 6000 times.

Just a little note: The word ‘that’ is often overused and unnecessarily included in writing so watch out for it. It happens to be one of the words counted as a commonly used English word, so if you want to check for overuse using Wordle you will either need to include commonly used English words or check the list showing how many times each word was used.

I hope you all have a bit of fun with Wordle. I would love for everyone to leave a comment on which word stands out the most in your Wordle 🙂