Friday, November 13, 2009

Resources for Writerly Fun

As writers, we use a variety of resources to help us do our work: dictionaries, thesauruses, style manuals, reference materials, Wikipedia, and many many more. But in between the writing spurts, writers also needs distractions, something to get the creative juices flowing when we are stuck staring at a blank screen. I'm not sure what people did before the computer... stare out the window? But before the internet, this "break" was often accomplished by playing a few games of Solitaire or Minesweeper. Then along came email, news websites, lol cats, and ultimately Facebook, all of which are excellent time wasters, but sadly have very little to do with writing and, therefore, rarely spark creativity.

However, the internet is always evolving and providing us with new forms of entertainment. Wordle creates "word clouds" from text you provide, giving prominence to words that appear most often. It allows you to change the color schemes, fonts, and layouts of your clouds. This little application really helps you see your text in a new way and definitely makes you feel less guilty about not actually writing.

This is a Wordle of this website, The Write Impression.

Wordle: The Write Impression

3 comments:

Capturing Sunshine said...

The coolest!! I have tried to create Wordles many times in the past, but the site never worked for me. Now it does!! Yay!

I love your site Wordle! Very creative!

Side note-If I did a Wordle of this comment, would a great big explamation point appear in the middle?

Capturing Sunshine said...

I was typing one handed. I meant exclamation point! ;)

Zea said...

That is indeed a very cool Wordle. I saw them for the first time on FB, heh, and they can be very telling. I look forward to trying one with some of my writing.

I like the topic of this post though. I think it is very important to give the brain a little reprieve during the writing process to let subconscious ideas float out or to ease the concentration. I remember spending a lot of time during undergrad playing spider solitaire in between drafting parts of numerous English class essays!