I love Wordle, the site at which you can input text and get a visual image of the most frequently used words. Frequency is measured by size. So, I took the text from the State of the Union address (thanks NPR for providing it) and below is the graphic Worlde produced. I did this once to a SOTU address from George W. Bush. As you can imagine, his most frequently used words were “fear,” “terrorism,” “terrorist,” “war.” You have the idea. With Obama, the comparison has consistently been stark. You know: complete sentences, multi-syllable words, subject and verb agreement, and such.
Oh, and in the warm spirit of coming together that our law makers so admirably modeled for the nation last night by sitting in the same building, for my Wordle below, I chose as my font of choice, Kenyan Coffee, just to make the Birthers feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Interestingly, after the speech, NPR asked 4,000 listeners to describe the president’s speech in three words. Below is the impression the listeners took away from the speech. (Source: The Daily Dish at the Atlantic)
kewl – but how do you save the word cloud?
You can save them to Wordle’s public forum. I never do. I just make a screen shot of it and post it. You might also want to check out Tagul. It has some interesting twists to it.