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Saturday, September 8, 2012

An interesting tool...

Right, so I went to dragon*con, turned in my dissertation, and basically had one of the hardest weeks ever. But we'll talk about that some other time.

Today, I want to share the awesomeness of wordle.

Word clouds are pretty incredible because you can see what words you use all the time in your document. For instance, this is my entire dissertation. That pretty much sums it up.






You see pretty quickly that my dissertation is about the alteration of CAIs. Neat right?

Well, then I put through chapter one of my WIP...



Do you see my problem? Just. The "just" is almost as big as the word "Maria" who is a centerpiece of that scene.

So this is why wordle is a really good tool. This is also why word clouds can be really embarrassing. If a word like just makes my word cloud, that's a problem. And now I know I should probably eliminate a few of them. So happy wordle to you all.

So I'll recap Dragon*Con on monday(ish).

9 comments:

  1. i love wordle, but i'm not brave enough to put my writing in it...
    and way to get thru such a tough week!

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    1. Thanks, I just hope I don't have to do that again. And yeah, wordle is very useful, but it reveals more truth than I'd expected.

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  2. I used to use 'just' a lot more. It's a tough word to cut out.
    You went to Dragon Con? Very cool!

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    1. Dragon*Con was so awesome! I loved it. But I can honestly recommend not doing anything important afterwards...

      Sorry I missed the monthly IWSG, I was tweaking my dissertation.

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  3. Oh geez. I'm scared to look. I know 'just' would show up on mine, too!

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    1. What was really great were some of the other words that popped up, like band. The scene takes place in the band room, so it makes sense, but the whole rest of the book? No mention of band. I'll probably want to work on that.

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  4. I love this. I recently did this and didn't see any words too big that made me cringe. Always good to check :)

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    1. That was just (<--- there's one in it's natural habitat) one chapter. When I ran it for the rest of the manuscript it was better. But it really caught my eye, so I'll be doing it from now on.

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  5. I've done this for my books. Just is one of mine. I love Wordle.

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