Analyze My Writing

This site, Analyze My Writing, allows users to copy and paste text from their document and have it analyzed.
Users can get basic text statistics, word clouds, common words and phrases, readability levels and much more.

Looks like this could be a great tool for students to use that goes beyond the basic word cloud analysis like Wordle or Tagul provides.

Give it a try with your text or their practice text.

http://www.analyzemywriting.com/

Another Word Cloud Generator

I love word clouds and have talked about Wordle previously.
 http://scottfirenza.blogspot.com/search/label/word%20clouds

Another one recently brought to my attention that I had forgotten about is Tagul. https://tagul.com

Tagul requires a free account to be created which can be created your Google, Facebook, or Twitter account or just an email address.

Teachers or students can create their own word cloud by typing in words to be added or importing a list of word. In Wordle to get the words to show up larger you would just type them in multiple times, which is great with importing text like a speech. However, if you are just wanting some of your words bigger Tagul allows you to designate the size of the word. Users can also set the color of each word, the angle, and the font. Tagul also allows users to create their word cloud as a certain shape.

Tagul also allows for a variety of ways to share your word cloud, including email, links, downloads, and embed codes.

Created with Tagul.com

Teacher can enter all of the student's names into the word cloud for graphics to use during the school year or a class shirt. Teachers can enter text, like to the Gettysburg address above, and have students guess the speech or event or speaker. Students can enter their paragraph they have written to see which words stand out the most in their summary or story.

Use a Word Cloud to Analyze the SOTU Address

President Obama gave the State of the Union address last night. This would be a great time to work on analyzing text with students.

Take the text from the speech (found as prepared for delivery).
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/24/remarks-president-state-union-address

Highlight and copy that text.

Go to Wordle.net to create the word cloud. http://www.wordle.net/create

Paste in the text into the text field

Click the Go button
 


Once the word cloud is created you can play with the font, layout, and color to adjust your cloud to your preference.





























Now students can analyze the speech by looking at the words that stand out most.














Then you can do the same for the Republican response and compare the words used most in each speech.