The Engl 90 students were turning in their second polished essays -- and all the prep work they'd done to create those essays (at least a half-dozen pieces of writing). Because they're all such visual folks (they'd already drawn some pictures -- reading someone else's essay about a person of influence and then drawing a picture of that person), I had them do another visual thing with their words:
Wordle
I've talked about it before on this blog because it's just so cool: you paste in any amount of text or the URL for a website, and the software generates a visual image of the words. Bigger words means greater frequency. You can play around with the colors, fonts, sizes, orientations, backgrounds -- even the languages! I told students that I wouldn't be able to read anything other than English - dang!
Oh, and speaking of language translation, today is International Translators' Day [this link has Wordles!]. I learned this from an audience member at Maxine Hong Kingston's talk tonight. And one of my tech writing students decided to give his oral presentation on Monday in Pirate. Yep, it's been a good day.
Anyway, the Engl 90 students loved Wordle; some of them went to other websites and saw what happened. A couple of students realized that if the biggest word on their Wordle was "the," maybe they need to use some sentence variety. Yes!
And now: here's a Wordle of this blog post.
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