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Stupendously Ultimate Word Cloud

October 16, 2009 by Nathan Bransford 131 Comments

While you’re waiting for me to finish reading the entries and decide on the finalists, I thought you might enjoy this word cloud of all the entries. I pasted all 2,651 comments/entries (which translated to about 247,000 words) into the word cloud generator on wordle.net.

Here’s the result:

The prominence of “like” is a reflection of how many similes there were in the first paragraphs.

I’ll be back tomorrow with the finalists!

Filed Under: Contests Tagged With: contests, Word Cloud

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Reesha says

    October 16, 2009 at 1:55 pm

    Argh. Not another one.
    I was up until 4am playing with wordle. šŸ˜€

    It's such a fun tool. Great for figuring out which character is truly my main character (most mentioned) in my story, and good for identifying themes I didn't know were there.

    Reply
  2. Karla says

    October 16, 2009 at 2:03 pm

    There were quite a few entries removed by the author. Not surprising, though. I can think of a few contests I've entered and later wished I could yank that piece of writing back. (Sometimes immediately after I hit 'submit')

    Reply
  3. Cat Woods says

    October 16, 2009 at 2:08 pm

    And here I thought like was a result of tween's talking quasi-valley girl…

    Reply
  4. Andrew the author says

    October 16, 2009 at 2:35 pm

    Has anyone called dibs on compiling all those first paragraphs into one story made of nothing but hooks?… Albeit a long, confusing story.

    Reply
  5. Anonymous says

    October 16, 2009 at 2:53 pm

    Wow. That's so cool!

    Reply
  6. Peri1020 says

    October 16, 2009 at 2:53 pm

    I saw this site on another blog some months ago but lost the link. Now I have it again! Thanks so much for posting it.

    P.S. Just checked…not a single "like" in my paragraph.

    Reply
  7. Rowenna says

    October 16, 2009 at 3:00 pm

    Wordle = new toy for me to play with instead of working. Incredible!

    Reply
  8. Anonymous says

    October 16, 2009 at 3:01 pm

    I just pasted all of the comments onto wordle. Very beautiful.

    Reply
  9. PatriciaW says

    October 16, 2009 at 3:03 pm

    What an interesting way to discover what words are most prominent in a manuscript. If "like" or "know" or "realized" or "but" stick out, bad news.

    Reply
  10. Bill Mabe says

    October 16, 2009 at 3:07 pm

    Frame that.

    Since "vampire" was conspicuously absent, I'll be sending you a query any day for my novel, "Way Better than Twilight."

    Reply
  11. Amber Lough says

    October 16, 2009 at 3:13 pm

    Beautiful.

    Reply
  12. Lucy Woodhull says

    October 16, 2009 at 3:30 pm

    I enjoy the fact that "dead" and "body" are in that cloud. Ya'll are a bloodthirsty bunch! Makes me think I need to kill off more characters… maybe the one who uses "like" too much.

    Reply
  13. Chuck H. says

    October 16, 2009 at 3:42 pm

    Veronica Barton-Dean said "We could be given the same sentence to start with and each of us would come up with something different." Does anyone else smell a contest in that?

    Word Ver: protork – well, I've never actually been against torks.

    Reply
  14. Jana says

    October 16, 2009 at 3:45 pm

    Love it!

    Mind you, I also like MS Word's Auto Summarize feature. No, it doesn't work as intended – but it's always good for a chuckle.

    Try taking your latest manuscript and ask Word to summarize it in 500 words.

    The results are usually nonsensical – but funny when read out loud.

    Reply
  15. Jarucia says

    October 16, 2009 at 4:05 pm

    Hmh, I'm surprised that only one of those words is in my first paragraph.

    But "know" is a fairly big one…and it's in there twice.

    Maybe that's what I get for writing fantasy.

    Reply
  16. Karla says

    October 16, 2009 at 4:07 pm

    Jana-
    I'd never used that Auto Summarize feature before. It was bizarre and hilarious, and hopefully not an accurate summary of my manuscript!

    Reply
  17. Deb says

    October 16, 2009 at 4:28 pm

    Interesting! I can't find a single word on your puzzle that came from my submitted paragraph. I don't know if I should be depressed because I’m so different or elated because I may be unique.

    Reply
  18. Jarucia says

    October 16, 2009 at 4:30 pm

    I'd never used AutoSummarize before now.

    It saddens me.

    Reply
  19. Sam Hranac says

    October 16, 2009 at 4:31 pm

    A quick check, I think I only used the word day from that blob. Not sure what that means.

    Reply
  20. Laura Martone says

    October 16, 2009 at 4:33 pm

    I agree with Orange Slushie (great name, BTW!) – that would look awesome on a wall. But I repeat my statement from a couple posts ago. I don't envy you, Nathan. 247,000 words?!! Sheesh. How can you possibly read these paragraphs in a couple days – even if you skim?

    Reply
  21. Sam Hranac says

    October 16, 2009 at 4:35 pm

    Okay. Just did this wordle thing on my current ms. It was delightful to see the flavor of the ms come through! Fun stuff.

    Reply
  22. Phyllis says

    October 16, 2009 at 4:35 pm

    This is extremely cool.

    "Like" is incredibly prominent. According to Wikipedia's word frequency lists, "like" ranks 76th in all Gutenberg project texts. In contemporary fiction, it's more frequent: rank 36.

    Here's the link: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists#Top_English_words_lists

    Reply
  23. Andrew the author says

    October 16, 2009 at 4:38 pm

    I wish I could still submit a different paragraph that includes those and ONLY those words. The first sentence might be:

    One body was just like back around the time you felt your first black eye.

    Reply
  24. Janine says

    October 16, 2009 at 6:36 pm

    Wordle is cute, but the AutoCrit Editing Wizard is REALLY useful.

    It's great at finding the weaknesses in my manuscript.

    Reply
  25. Bill Baynes says

    October 16, 2009 at 6:56 pm

    Hi:

    Thanks for choosing me as a finalist, but how come you didn't include my paragraph on your blog?

    Bill Baynes

    Reply
  26. Lily G says

    October 16, 2009 at 11:25 pm

    I put the finalists' paragraphs through Wordle for a lark. It came back with "back". Hmm…

    Reply
  27. Kathie says

    October 17, 2009 at 4:40 am

    I have teenagers, Nathan. They use "like" in every freaking sentence. So I went to Wordle, tossed in my latest MS and bada-boom, bada-bing apparently I use the word LIKE a bit too much, too.

    So, thank you. I'm going to use this to help me identify the overusage. The site has a lot of nifty, useful tools there so I have a great new obsession.

    And damn you, Nathan! Now I have something else to obsess over. /tease

    PS: It sucks that I have to use my Google identity and can't use my website and email address.

    Reply
  28. Anonymous says

    October 21, 2009 at 1:17 am

    Wow… I should really watch how many times I say like…

    Reply
  29. Anonymous says

    October 21, 2009 at 1:26 am

    Wow, this would be a greatHallmark card.

    Reply
  30. Diana says

    October 22, 2009 at 11:59 am

    I'm a little late to this, but I see the words "just" and "even" are also prominent. Not surprising, I see submissions filled with those two words. They are rather overused, in my opinion.

    Cool site. Thanks for the link. I might run a few submissions through it to see what I come up with.

    Reply
  31. Anonymous says

    September 3, 2010 at 8:19 pm

    Unfortunately, Wordle comes with an unsigned ActiveX control and Windows 7 won't allow it to download to my computer. I used it on my older XP computer and it was a lot of fun and was a nice tool to see which words I needed to pare down.

    Reply
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