Wordle – mix it up!

Wordle – have I gone dislexic? Has my spell-checker given up through exhaustion?  No Wordle is a strange little online application written by an IBM programmer, but made available free to anyone who wants to try it.  It takes text which you can paste in and analyses it for repeated words, and then provides a visual representation of the words.  You can also paste in the URL of a blog.  So I tried this blog to see how it looks …

blog wordle

Wordle removes the small linking words that are repeated and do not change the sense of a piece of text too much.  This then allows you to focus on the key words conveying meaning.  The more a word is repeated the larger it appears on the image.  If you try it you can adapt the text, play about a little with the colour schemes and the text orientation.

The analysis is very simple and certainly doesn’t provide a substitute for full content analysis, but for a quick analysis. It is really interesting to see which words I have emphasised in the writing.  I just tried this with a postgrad student research proposal and one of the interesting things that has come out of it is the number of times the text contained the words ‘may’ and ‘hope’.  It immediately indicated to me that the paper needed to be expressed more positively.  Are there any other quick text analysis application like this that you can recommend?

Here’s one other I have used:

http://textalyser.net/

This one provides an analysis of some common text analysis statistics, such as wordcounts of total words, unique words, complexity (lexical density), readability (‘fog’ index), top words and phrases.  This can give a good indication of how good a piece of writing is and can be useful indicator of your style and how clear it is.

I wouldn’t use this kind of thing every time you write (I certainly don’t), but it may be worth putting a couple of pieces of your writing through this analysis to see if there are any patterns that can be improved or change appropriately.  I have done this and it can be quite instructive!

What do you think?  Is this of any use or is this simply over-analysing your writing and making the process of writing painful?!  Can you suggest alternative tools (not necessarily online) that could be used to analyse and improve writing?

Now to try out another application … Please respond to the poll about Wordl below.

Thanks!

Kenny