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