Fun With Word Clouds

While I was editing and revising The Other Half, part of the process involved analyzing the text using tools to help me find errors that were less obvious than simple spelling and grammar. One tool I discovered helped me see the most common words in a rather novel way.

The concept behind a Word or Tag Cloud is to show the most common word largest, with increasingly smaller words as the number of occurances gets smaller. This can help an author see if they have habitually or unintentionally overused certain words. Ideally what you want to see is a good distribution of different words.

I found a great website for creating tag cloud images called Wordle. I put my manuscript in and what came out was a mad jumble dominated by pronouns, articles and other common words. I found a simple script to count the words in my manuscript while eliminating the 130 or so most common words to reduce the noise. When I fed that into Wordle, I got this out.

The Other Half Word Cloud

It's obvious to me now that the most common words would be the characters' names, such as Julie, Jack, Sophie, and Polly. I had to examine my manuscript for why 'back' and 'like' appeared so often, but none of the occurances I spot checked felt wrong or overused to me. I may add them to the list of words to exclude in the future.

I found the result so fascinating I decided to share it with the world. Let me know what you think!
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Published on May 28, 2013 13:24 Tags: text-analysis, word-cloud
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