I have a confession. I love words and I have an obsession with word clouds. I love the different sizes, the different fonts, the varying thickness of words mixed in. I love the glorious display of color and the creative picture it delivers.

What really fascinates me about word clouds is the way important words are exaggerated. The more a word is used in a document, the bigger it shows in the cloud. You are able to “see” what value an author places on a word.

As I am editing my book, I wondered if a word cloud would show me what words I use the most. What if my most used word is an adverb….like (gasp) an ‘ly’ word? What if the word ‘said’ showed up? That would mean I need more action tags instead of dialogue tags. This could be a useful tool, don’t you think?

So, here is my Wordle of the current book I am editing. You can make your own Wordle HERE.

Well, you can see my main characters’ names, for sure, which is okay, but there are words such as FELT, ASKED, JUST, KNEW, JUST, BEGAN, NEED, and SAW. Those words may not be bad, per se, but for it to show up in a Wordle means they were used a lot. I can see I need to do a ‘search” in Word for these particular words and see if I can use stronger  and more meaningful words. Isn’t that a cool tool?

Just for fun, I made a Tweet Cloud. I found this fun ap through CJ’s blog. You can certainly see what I like to tweet about.