Dave's Wordle Challenge

Dave Dodgson has set us all a challenge named "Every blog has a silver lining". The idea, if you haven't already heard about it, is to create a Wordle of your blog by pasting in its URL and looking at the results. Wordle will take all the content from your recent posts and show you which words you have been using more often, by increasing the font size. The bigger words are those you have used more often. Below you can find the word cloud of this blog. I have removed  people's names, as they don't really tell us much - they are only there because I wrote two posts about the TESOL Spain conference recently. (Oops, just realised that I missed one!)

As you can see, the most popular word by far is CHILDREN. This is hardly surprising, seeing as the majority of my students are children and that my blog focuses on them. Other important words come from my last post on story writing and the previous posts on the conference I attended.

Things I have noticed:

I seem to use a lot of nouns! The words that stand out most are nouns, and there are few adjectives - I don't know whether this is normal or not, but I think it illustrates the fact that I don't have a particular writing style - I write in a similar way to the way I speak and I think this makes my blog easy to read.

Like many other bloggers taking part in this challenge, I seem to use the word ONE quite a lot! I would imagine that this comes from "one of the ..." type phrases, but I am just guessing here. I haven't noticed any unusual words on the Wordle.

As this word cloud seem to only use the last four or five posts, I think it would be very interesting to look at the "all-time" word stats. I suppose the only way of doing this would be to literally copy and paste each post into Wordle, although there is probably a limit to the number of words you can include. As Dave suggests, it could be something to do every now and again, to see how your blog is evolving.