WORDLE:

Creating Word-Clouds Poems While Teaching Writing

By Jim Trelease

ow many writing teachers are aware of the amazing online application called Wordle? It has many diverse usages, from charting the vovabulary differences in the inaugural addresses of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to creating poetry in the form of word-clouds.

The latter would certainly be one use for the writing teacher, to say nothing of the art teacher. The teacher could ask the class to write every word they can associate with school or reading or music—any subject. Write 25 words you associate with that subject but the entire class is writing these words about the same subject, not in complete sentences but as individual word-associations. All of these words would then be fed into Wordle online.

For the writing teacher, there is another use as well. It is not an uncommon mistake for young writers to over-use certain words, just as they do in everyday speech ( “like,” “you know,” etc.). Wordle provides a graphic means to show the student his or her writing strengths or weaknesses.

I recently took an essay I wrote about Dr. Ben Carson and Leonard Pitts Jr., totaling 1248 words, and fed it into Wordle. What it gave me almost immediately was a usage-chart of my essay’s wording; that is, how often I used the most frequently used vocabulary in the essay. (see chart below) The word "Carson" appears largest, and rightly so. But suppose I was overusing the word "like" — then that would be large too. Notice how large the word "mother" appears. That's because the mothers of both Pitts and Carson were significant figures in the essay.

The Wordle Web site also features a gallery of word-clouds that other people have constructed, many quite interesting, but a few that might be inappropriate for students. So someone has come up with a means by which the gallery can be placed off-limits by your school’s tech-person. The link to that is:
http://blog.wordle.net/2009/08/how-to-make-wordle-safe-for-classroom.html.

Happy Wordling! Why not? After all, we "google," don't we?

(Created by http://www.wordle.net/)