Wordle

At the top: Words from the lyrics of "Amazing Grace."
On the bottom: Words from the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet.

Some classmates introduced me to this website: www.wordle.net. On this site you can copy and paste any amount of text into a box which scrambles the words up into a "word cloud." The words which appear the most often are made larger than the words which appear less frequently. Once it creates the word cloud for you, you can mess around with the layout, font, and color of the cloud. This could be a simple and creative way for students to artistically publish their papers; it could possibly serve as a cover to their actual paper. If students have a problem with repeating the same words over and over again in their papers, this could be a great way to help them identify which words they keep repeating. It's also interesting to plug the words of your favorite speech, poem, song, or short story into the box to see which words appear the most often. Try it out.