Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Word Clouds

What is a word cloud, you might ask me?  Why is this ridiculous thing important to literature and writing?  Well, I'm going to tell you.  Below is my word cloud for "I See."



Word clouds take in ALL of the words that you write in any piece of writing and, depending on how much you use the word, adjust the size.  So, if we look at this, the words "going" and "just" are bigger than the characters names (Helen, Hector, Archer.)  That means that I probably used those words WAY too often.  Really, I should go back and edit it, take them out and make sure my character names are at least the largest

Word cloud also takes out words like "it, the, he, she" because, for obvious reasons, pronouns are going to skew your scale a little.  So it's a really good tool for editing because it points out some really obvious things (I can't even tell you why "going" is used that much in my book.  It's a mystery.)

If you look, Cassandra (my main character) barely shows up.  "Cass" is very little right by the top of the "T" in "just".  However, my book is written in first person, so that's normal and probably the way that it should be.

So word clouds are really just fun editing tools.  They look cool AND they're helpful. :)

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