Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.—Rabindranath Tagore
By Scoti Springfield Domeij
We all tend to overuse certain words. Identifying familiar word patterns can be difficult. Words add color and richness to your writing. The tools below can help you visually identify words you repeat too often.
Fun with Words
Wordle, a toy to generate "word clouds" from text, gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in your text. Wordle uses the number of times a word appears in a text to determine its relative size.
How to Use
- Tweak your words with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes
- Take a screenshot of your Wordle picture
- Use the images created with Wordle to share with friends, post on your blog, or print T-Shirts, business cards, brochures, or whatever you imagine
Improve Your Key Word Google Searches
Search Cloudlet is an easy-to-use Firefox add-on that inserts context-aware tag clouds into a traditional Google, Yahoo and Twitter interface to help you navigate more efficiently through search results.
Why Use It?
- Extends your browser
- Shows all the keywords relevant to your search results
- Narrows your search by clicking keywords on the cloud to add them to your search query
- Finds tag-clouds, server-clouds, author-clouds, recipient-clouds and other powerful navigation tools smoothly integrated into your Google, Yahoo and Twitter searches
Analyze Words You Overuse
TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating a tag cloud or text cloud. Enter a webpage URL, upload a text document or paste a piece of text to discover key or overused words.
How to Use
- as visual poetry
- as one way to see words you tend to overuse
- as topic summaries for speeches and written works
- as brand clouds to see how you're perceived by the world
- as blog tool or website analysis for search engine optimization (SEO)