It can also highlight trends in other text, like results from open-ended survey questions or comments. For example, I often overuse certain terms unintentionally, and that shows up bright and clear on a word cloud. I find word clouds to be a great way to look for patterns in text, especially things I have written. It's easy to tell that I talk a lot about technology literacy, awareness, and biases. I like that this word cloud makes it easy to get the 'gist' of my paper (and my philosophy) without having to read the whole paper. This word cloud was generated from the text of a paper I wrote last term (fall 2013) describing my personal philosophy of education. I usually just click Randomize a few times to get a feel for how different layouts, colors, and fonts will look, then settle on one (and maybe add a few tweaks of my own). Or, you can use my favorite feature, the 'Randomize' button. You can right click on any word to remove it from the cloud (if it's dominating the cloud, and making the differences between other terms hard to discern), and control the layout, colors, and font. There are other tools to create word clouds, but Wordle is free and easy to use, and has some great features. Word clouds can make for great accompaniment to papers and articles on the web, or in presentations.

When you're done, you can print your word cloud, or save it to the public gallery, but I usually just take a screenshot and use it as a simple image (I wish there was an easy way to save a full size, high quality version as an image).

Even though it's a web-based tool, it requires the Java plugin, which can be a bit tricky to get installed and working, but if you use a modern browser like Chrome or Firefox, it should work just fine. You can create word cloud by pasting in a block of text, or by providing the URL to a website's RSS feed (it's easier to just paste the text).

is a free online tool that lets you create a ' word cloud' (also called a 'tag cloud') - a computer generated arrangement of text that uses relative size, position, and color to highlight word frequency.

Create a wordle online free