Wordle

Not only is this a really fun thing to do with words, it’s incredibly useful when writing a novel. To use Wordle, go to www.wordle.net and paste a chunk of text into the empty box. Wordle will create a word cloud with the words used most often appearing largest. When I pasted the synopsis for “The Lotus Leaf Effect” into Wordle, I ended up with a cloud that had the main character–Ella–in huge letters with other primary characters a bit smaller. Other BIG words are “water,” “family” and “walking.” Just as it should be.
I put the entire text of my manuscript into Wordle a couple of edits ago and discovered that the word, “just” was huge. I use “just” waaaay too often. It was a great tool for finding my writing “tics” and then editing them out. Find you a chunk of text and play with Wordle–it’s a blast!