Thanks for introducing me to Wordle. TagCrowd is admittedly limited in scope and purpose, but I included it here as an interesting gadget that could be used for quick visualization of a writer’s vocabulary. It’s not the only tool that writing instructors could or should use with all their students, but it could be helpful for some students if they have a pattern of using certain words repetitively.

It’s just a suggestion, of course. Every day I learn about new online tools, so I share the ones that could be of interest to educators.

Cheers,

Anne

Worldle is probably as efficient for the purposes you propose, but there are far more uses that Wordle can be put to than TagCrowd. Further to this, I wonder at the real use that it can provide a writer in terms of the use of the words.

Frequency of use is only one very slender aspect of the use of words. The design of these word cloud/crown apps is such that they discard a lot of prepositional and conjunctive words anyway.

I’d be inclined to direct my students to the Flesch Reading Ease scale in Word. It’s more likely to make writers think about what they write and how they write it than simply the frequency of the use of a few idiosyncratic words.

Catchya later
from Middle-earth

I thought I would respond here to see if I can solicit good suggestions on how to approach this topic issue you raise. We think about this a lot and want to get it as right as possible.

As you may know, any member can create a new topic. We think this is the right approach despite the obvious drawbacks (such as the one you mention). To help with the downside of user-created topics, we are building a feature now that will allow the community of users to “raise a flag” when they see issues such as the overlap issue you identify. For example, you might raise a flag indicating that topic A is a dplicate of topic B, and therefore they should be combined. The community would then actually vote on the issue you raise, and once the vote is complete, the topics would be merged (or not) depending on the outcome of the vote.

Our goal is to make this a community-moderated site – so we are hoping to leave these decisions to community members (thus the new feature mentioned above). In addition, we recognize that it would be a bad idea for us to impose our own view of the “correct” topic hierarchy – especially since there is no such thing as ONE correct hierarchy.

So – does our approach make sense to you? Do you have an idea that you think would be more effective?

In the meantime, it is my experience that in the vast majority of cases the topic hierarchy is reasonably clear and non-overlapping. Having said that, there are a couple notable exceptions such as the one you raise. And even in those exceptins, it is usually a very small number (2 or maybe 3) topics that you might have to “watch” to ensure nothing is missed. But as I say – hopefully even that will be cleared up as the collection grows, certain topics emerge as the “right” ones, and duplicate topics are removed from the system through voting.

Please let me know if we are on the right track.

Best regards – Murray