by inserting myself into NaBloPoMo Blogroll with a commitment to blog every day in November. Not interested in writing a Na…whatever it is that writes a novel in a month, I have jumped into blogging every day for a month. Along with finishing The Memoir.
I didn’t even know about NaBloPoMO until this morning, November 1st, when I opened the page to pass on information on two writing tools I’ve come to love and use. And then I saw it and then I signed up. Ya gotta wonder.
So, in order to get at least two days of blogging planned, I’ll do them one at a time.
From the site: “Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to your own desktop to use as you wish.” http://www.wordle.net/
The above image is a cloud from this particular blog post. Using “word” often I understand, but did I really write “really” often enough to make it stand out?
You will need Java, so if you don’t have it, get it first.
Here’s what you do. Go to the site. Click on Create. Paste in a bunch of text, I use as much as thirty or forty pages at a time, click Go.
Wordle creates this most amazing word cloud of the most used words, the really really most used jump out at you, and you can then paste that word into find and rewrite all the sentences in your manuscript that contain that too-used word. Fabulous.
I found “home” a lot. That’s reasonable since the memoir is about finding where I fit. Another word, came, was not as useful. Nor was went or turned. I won’t bore you with the list of words but you get the idea.
The cool thing is being able to SEE one sentence at a time and the sentences around it and revise. It’s helped to focus on one sentence rather than a paragraph with meaning.
Test it out. You’ll be glad you did.
Tomorrow, and hopefully tomorrow I’ll remember I committed to this, a tool from Princeton.
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janetsunderland.com 