Working with Word Clouds

Ready to get started with word clouds? Mr. Byrne and Ms. Kitsis offer the following tips for working in Wordle:

• • Make your word cloud show phrases instead of individual words by connecting them with a tilde (~). For example, to make "American Dream" appear as a phrase, enter it as "American~Dream." This can be quickly accomplished by using the "find and replace" function in Word.

  • The default maximum number of words to display is 150 words, but you can set it to show all of your words by creating your word cloud, then going to the drop-down menu under "Layout" and clicking on "Maximum words."

  • You can delete words you don't want to have appear in your word cloud by right-clicking on them. For example, Mr. Byrne removed the name of the film and director from the cloud so they would not dominate.

  • Word clouds cannot be saved directly in Wordle. Instead, take a screen shot by pressing Ctrl-Print Screen (to copy an image of your screen to the clipboard) and pasting it into your Word doc, PowerPoint presentation, etc.

Word clouds can be a great way to see common themes in a large body of text. Try it with student work, online discussions, literary texts, famous speeches, and more. Have fun!

Tip: Another word cloud generator worth checking out is Tagxedo, which generates fun shapes AND allows word clouds to be saved as images. It offers more options and has a slightly steeper learning curve. Not all features are free, but there's plenty to get you started.

Need help getting started? Just ask!