Fun And Help For Writers With Wordle

I ran across some free software on the internet that makes “word clouds” out of any writing. By this I mean that it creates a graphic of the most used words and sizes them according to how often they are used.

I pasted in the first third of my book and this is what it produced:

Not only is this fun, but it is useful to find those words that an author uses too much. For instance I use SAID too many times. I learned this from one of my Genesis Contest judges, but if not, this tool would have helped me to catch it.

But there are other words there that surprised me, so this will help my editing process. Even the “small” words are important to look at, as they are among the top 150 words of the document.

Why did I only submit the first third of my novel? Well … because I didn’t trust this website enough to “give” the owner my entire novel. If he wants to try to write my last two-thirds, that’s fine! But I’m not going to submit my entire novel to a stranger, and I suggest you show prudence as well. Doubtful there is little danger here, but why throw caution to the wind?

One Hint About My Book: If anyone reads the “word cloud” above, you might notice the name “Garthwisyk” there. If you are interested in reading about some of the legends behind my series, do an internet search on “Garthwys” and you’ll have some fun reading.

And the very discerning among you might actually catch a tiny coincidental tie in to Stephen Lawhead’s book, Merlin.